Sarajevo

Angelina Jolie says she is grateful and proud to have officially been named an honorary citizen of Sarajevo and that she will visit the city this summer to personally express her gratitude. The city held a ceremony to bestow the honor upon Jolie on Thursday. In an audio message played during the event at the National Theater, Jolie said she was "proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire. " The city decided to honor the actress for her role in preserving the "truth about the war" in Bosnia through her...

Sunbathing one day, snowstorm the next: Bosnians are getting whiplash from the latest crazy weather to hit the Balkans. Weeks after Bosnians had stashed away their winter clothes and their memories of last winter's unbearably heavy snow, residents had to drag out the shovels Monday after waking up to a blanket of snow in the middle of an otherwise unusually hot May. Some 50 remote villages in a mountainous area near the Bosnian capital of...

Hello to All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace , By John Falk Holt, 304 pp, $25 He's on a C-130 transport plane, about to descend from the clouds straight into hell: the besieged city of Sarajevo, ripped to shreds by genocidal war. But for John Falk, exhilaration is more potent than fear. Danger and bloodshed are the medicine he seeks. Besides, he's fashioned himself as a war correspondent, and this is what war correspondents do. This opening scene of Falk's triumphant memoir, "Hello to All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace," gives a glimpse of how far...

Angelina Jolie says she is grateful and proud to have officially been named an honorary citizen of Sarajevo and that she will visit the city this summer to personally express her gratitude. The city held a ceremony to bestow the honor upon Jolie on Thursday. In an audio message played during the event at the National Theater, Jolie said she was "proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire. " The city decided to honor the actress for her role in preserving the "truth about the war" in Bosnia through her...

Sunbathing one day, snowstorm the next: Bosnians are getting whiplash from the latest crazy weather to hit the Balkans. Weeks after Bosnians had stashed away their winter clothes and their memories of last winter's unbearably heavy snow, residents had to drag out the shovels Monday after waking up to a blanket of snow in the middle of an otherwise unusually hot May. Some 50 remote villages in a mountainous area near the Bosnian capital of...

Bosnian police have discovered around 1.5 million pornographic images of children on the computer of a man they suspect of blackmailing United States citizens. Police said Thursday that the man from Sarajevo — identified only by his initials E.S. — used "highly sophisticated" computer programs to illegally access email accounts of unidentified U.S. citizens to copy child porn material and bank cards details from their email accounts. They said that the suspect used the material to blackmail money from the Americans.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - A Serb group has said it will build a large memorial cross on a hill from which Serb artillery shelled Sarajevo during the 1992-96 Bosnia war. The plan has outraged an association of war victims, who condemned it yesterday as an insult to the thousands of people who died in the conflict, especially the many Bosnian Muslim victims. Branislav Dukic, head of the Association of Bosnian Serb War Victims, yesterday confirmed media reports that his group plans to begin building the 85-foot cross on Trebevic Hill in April in memory of Serb war victims.

Officials in Bosnia say police are searching several locations and questioning people who could be linked to the man who fired an automatic weapon at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in what authorities called a terrorist attack. A policeman and the gunman were wounded in Friday's attack. None of the embassy's employees was hurt. The gunman came from a Muslim-dominated region of Serbia and is a follower of the ultraconservative Muslim Wahhabi sect. State Prosecutor Dubravko Campara said Saturday morning the investigation is being conducted in...

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A postcard sent home by a Bosnian soldier in World War I has finally reached his family after 95 years, thanks to an American antique collector who delivered it personally to the man’s grandson after buying it at a fair in Long Beach, Calif. “Oh my God,’’ was all Nadir Bicakcic could say when he recognized the face on the card. For Nihad Eric Dzinovic, a 63-year-old retired jeweler living in California, it was as if one of the 200,000 old postcards he collected over the decades had come alive: In front of him stood someone who greatly resembled a face on the...

Hundreds of students will join Somali-born singer K'naan , Watertown-bred actress Eliza Dushku , John Kerry 's daughter Vanessa , and two dozen national organizations at Harvard this weekend for the Millennium Campus Conference, a three-day gathering focused on ending global poverty and achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. This is the third MCC, whose organizer Sam Vaghar is off to a speaking gig in Sarajevo immediately afterward at the request of the State Department.

Angelina Jolie says she's nervous and excited about the upcoming premiere in Sarajevo of her Bosnian war movie "In the Land of Blood and Honey. " The film, which is showing at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday, is set to make its full debut in the Bosnian capital on Feb. 14, though it already has been shown to some groups there. Already released in the U.S., Jolie's directorial debut is a drama about a Serb soldier who finds his ex-lover, a Muslim Bosnian woman, among sex slaves in a camp.

Bosnian police have discovered around 1.5 million pornographic images of children on the computer of a man they suspect of blackmailing United States citizens. Police said Thursday that the man from Sarajevo — identified only by his initials E.S. — used "highly sophisticated" computer programs to illegally access email accounts of unidentified U.S. citizens to copy child porn material and bank cards details from their email accounts. They said that the suspect used the material to blackmail money from the Americans.

Officials in Bosnia say police are searching several locations and questioning people who could be linked to the man who fired an automatic weapon at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in what authorities called a terrorist attack. A policeman and the gunman were wounded in Friday's attack. None of the embassy's employees was hurt. The gunman came from a Muslim-dominated region of Serbia and is a follower of the ultraconservative Muslim Wahhabi sect. State Prosecutor Dubravko Campara said Saturday morning the investigation is being conducted in coordination with police in Serbia...

Hundreds of students will join Somali-born singer K'naan , Watertown-bred actress Eliza Dushku , John Kerry 's daughter Vanessa , and two dozen national organizations at Harvard this weekend for the Millennium Campus Conference, a three-day gathering focused on ending global poverty and achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. This is the third MCC, whose organizer Sam Vaghar is off to a speaking gig in Sarajevo immediately afterward at the request of the State Department.

German director Wim Wenders and actress Charlotte Rampling will be among the guests at the 17th Sarajevo Film Festival that kicks off Friday evening. Over eight days, some 100,000 viewers will get to see some of the 200 films from dozens of countries. This year, the event will open with the screening of the "Le Havre" by Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. Organizers expect over 40 artists and politicians from the region to attend the screening of a Bosnian movie, "The Orchestra" — the biography of a pre-war rock group famous in the...

LONDON — A former Bosnian vice president arrested on war crimes charges objected yesterday to his potential extradition from Britain to Serbia, saying authorities in Belgrade won’t give him a fair trial. Ejup Ganic told reporters outside a London court that Serbia’s extradition request was politically motivated and distorted facts. He made the comments as a hearing opened to determine whether he should be sent to Belgrade to be prosecuted for atrocities he allegedly committed in 1992 during the Bosnian conflict.

LONDON — A former Bosnian vice president arrested on war crimes charges objected yesterday to his potential extradition from Britain to Serbia, saying authorities in Belgrade won’t give him a fair trial. Ejup Ganic told reporters outside a London court that Serbia’s extradition request was politically motivated and distorted facts. He made the comments as a hearing opened to determine whether he should be sent to Belgrade to be prosecuted for atrocities he allegedly committed in 1992 during the Bosnian conflict.

Angelina Jolie says she's nervous and excited about the upcoming premiere in Sarajevo of her Bosnian war movie "In the Land of Blood and Honey. " The film, which is showing at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday, is set to make its full debut in the Bosnian capital on Feb. 14, though it already has been shown to some groups there. Already released in the U.S., Jolie's directorial debut is a drama about a Serb soldier who finds his ex-lover, a Muslim Bosnian woman, among sex slaves in a camp.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A postcard sent home by a Bosnian soldier in World War I has finally reached his family after 95 years, thanks to an American antique collector who delivered it personally to the man’s grandson after buying it at a fair in Long Beach, Calif. “Oh my God,’’ was all Nadir Bicakcic could say when he recognized the face on the card. For Nihad Eric Dzinovic, a 63-year-old retired jeweler living in California, it was as if one of the 200,000 old postcards he collected over the decades had come alive: In front of him stood someone who greatly resembled a face on the...

“The dream involved danger, pain, and mystery, although there was also an encounter with a woman.’’ That one sentence, square in the middle of Aleksandar Hemon’s collection of linked stories, just about sums up this marvelous and original writer’s fiction, which again and again steers a hallucinatory path through dark and forbidding - but nevertheless enticing - terrain. In the first story, the 16-year-old son of a minor Yugoslav diplomat careens through the streets of Zaire with a Led Zeppelin-loving American low-life named Spinelli as his guide.