Croatia’s membership had been put on hold, not least because of concerns about freedom of the press.The state prosecutor appealed, however. They were prosecuted under a new law forbidding defamation of the President.To the surprise of most observers, the judge acquitted the editors last Septem- ber. Shortly afterwards, Croatia was admitted into the Council of Europe – in effect, the waiting room for membership of the European Union. Hence – at least in the view of many critics of the Croatian regime – today’s court case.
The editors of the Feral Tribune have already been in court before, in connection with the offending article and photographs, which appeared to compare President Tudjman with Ante Pavelic, leader of the Croatian fascist state during the Second World War, and with General Franco, the Spanish dictator.

Several cars had to be moved out of the reach of the flames but none was damaged.The official Christmas tree of the principality was larger than usual this year to mark the royal anniversary.The celebrations have already been somewhat scarred by political bickering on the future of the principality and the failure of most other European royal families to attend a gala event in the summer.. A trial opens in Zagreb today where press freedom itself seems to be in the dock. Steve Crawshaw reports on crime and punishment, in President Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia. Many trucks were unable to move because the roads were too slick.By yesterday morning the vehicles – mostly trucks – were backed up from the border to the southern edge of Berlin, about 56 miles away..

The self-proclaimed “largest Christmas tree in Europe” exploded and burned to the ground outside the casino in Monte Carlo on Saturday night. The demise of the pounds 100,000 tree – actually 450 trees draped on a 100ft
conical frame – is the latest misfortune to strike the celebrations for the 700th anniversary of Grimaldi family rule in Monaco.A short-circuit in one of the 2,200 strings of fairy lights needed to decorate the monster tree is blamed for the disaster. At the police station, an officer picked it up and threatened to fire if the group did not shut up. The gun went off, hitting Mr Fernandez in the mouth and killing him instantly The policeman has been placed in custody.. Truckers, holiday travellers and icy weather helped create a marathon traffic jam on the autobahn to Poland stretching almost 60 miles and trapping some drivers for 48 hours. The jam started early Friday, when freezing rain slowed truckers driving east from Berlin to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, the sole border-crossing for trucks to Poland.
Adding to the jam were Germans driving to Poland for cheap Christmas shopping and Poles who live in Germany heading home for the holidays.

Four shots were fired, one killing Mr Bouziane and another wounding a 19-year-old passenger. The death triggered two nights of clashes betweenyouths and riot police in suburbs between Melun and Fontainebleau where the men lived.Mr Fernandez was arrested in Lyons, with his two half-brothers A rifle was taken from one of the brothers. Abdelkadher Bouziane, 16, was shot and killed when his car crashed through a police road-block near Fontainebleau.
The death of the two men ignited two nights of riots in the “quartiers difficiles” (sink suburbs) in which they lived. The violence brings to a head weeks of rumbling in the deprived inner suburbs of a score of towns all over France.The National Front, and some mainstream right-wing politicians, have used the violence provoked by the incidents to call for a police clamp- down on deprived areas.Both men were French born from immigrant backgrounds, Mr Bouziane’s family from North Africa and Mr Fernandez’s from Spain.Mr Bouziane was driving – under age – his mother’s carwhen he refused to stop for police. The shooting by police of two young men, in separate incidents near Lyons and Fontainebleau, has sparked another round of violence in French cities John Lichfield reports from Paris.

Fabrice Fernandez, 24, was shot in the mouth in bizarre circumstances by a police officer while answering questions at a police station in Lyons. So it festers away, like another Balkan sore, with no prospect of a solution.. Since the international community has maintained its “outer wall” of sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro, denying the two republics access to international credit lines, outside investment cannot arrive. When Mr Milosevic travelled to China and Russia recently, in his new role as president of federal Yugoslavia, much was made on state television of the trade deals he signed. But these were no more than barter arrangements, with Serbia effectively begging for essential imports in exchange for oil and gas supplies it is barely capable of providing.The international community has maintained a two-edged attitude to Serbia: on the one hand looking to Mr Milosevic as a guarantor of the Dayton peace process in Bosnia, and on the other keeping up pressure in the hope that he will deliver the three things the West still wants: the handover of indicted war criminals living in Serbia, a financial settlement of the assets of the pre-war Yugoslavia, which he holds, and a political settlement in the province of Kosovo, whose majority Albanian population is clamouring for autonomy in the face of heavy Serbian police and army repression.For the moment, the political gridlock in Serbia is a convenient excuse for Mr Milosevic to ignore the Kosovo issue.