Meshpoint is a Croatian open source hardware company that turns out rugged, meshing, battery-powered wifi hotspots that get their backhaul from cellular networks; they're based on the widely used Open WRT free/open wifi routing software, and use open source hardware designs that are intended to stand up to punishing field conditions like those found in refugee camps. Read the rest
The proprietors of every Facebook page containing the word "Sarajevo" in its title reportedly received demand letters from the city government of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia, threatening legal action unless the proprietors pay a royalty for permission to use the city's name in their pages. Read the rest
Lupiga is a longrunning, much-loved independent news source in Croatia that is virtually single-handedly doing battle with the country's surging fascist movement; they're crowdfunding to continue operations. Read the rest
Bruce Sterling's short story "The Beachcomber of Novi Kotor" is a monologue by a rogue Montenegran artist-roboticist, delivered at the 85th Venice Biennale, in a world where climate change has made venices out of all the world's low-lying cities, where Montenegro has been plunged into economic collapse by the precipitous departure of the neo-Czarist Russian oligarchs whose tourist trade it depended on. Read the rest
An anonymous reader writes, "After snap elections on December 11th in Macedonia, when designers united against a dictatorship, Nikola Gruevski, the leader of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party gave a Milosevic-style speech declaring that foreign powers are interfering with the work of the SEC. VMRO-DPMNE won (for now) 51 seats, the opposition party won 49 of total 120 seats in Parliament. Yesterday, obituaries from the US and EU ambassadors to Macedonia appeared on IMGUR. Read the rest
Slobodan Simić is former Serbian parliamentarian who retired to become a conservationist who keeps a herd of Balkan rescue donkeys on the Zasavica Special Nature Reserve near Belgrade, along with wild pigs, cows and beavers, all Balkan species that had dwindled and that he's dedicated to bringing back. Read the rest
After leaked recordings of high-level government officials (including the PM) plotting to cover up a murder surfaced, Macedonia erupted into demonstrations that were met with extreme police brutality. Read the rest
