EU foreign policy chief urges Albania to sustain reforms on its path to membership

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EU foreign policy chief urges Albania to sustain reforms on its path to membership

2025-04-09 00:38 Last Updated At：00:41

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — The European Union ’s foreign policy chief on Tuesday hailed Albania's “ambitious” agenda to close full membership negotiations in two years and also urged the country's political parties to support difficult reforms ahead.

Kaja Kallas, who is on a regional tour, was in the Albanian capital, Tirana, to meet with the country’s leaders and assure them that the country's future is in the bloc.

“Albania has an ambitious agenda to close EU negotiations in the next two years,” Kallas said at a joint news conference with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. “It’s vital to sustain the high pace of reforms. And I also understand that the reforms are always quite difficult.”

Still, “Albania’s future is in the European Union,” she said.

Later Tuesday in Bosnia, Kallas warned of a “fragile” security situation following a series of separatist moves by the Bosnian Serb leadership that have led to a constitutional crisis.

“These actions contradict the commitments that Bosnia and Herzegovina has undertaken on its EU path,” Kallas said. “We will not tolerate any threats to the territorial integrity, sovereignty and constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Any attempts to break up the country are unacceptable.”

The Western Balkans countries — Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia — are at different stages in their applications for EU membership. They have been frustrated by the slow pace of progress, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 encouraged Europe’s leaders to push for the six to join the bloc.

While the EU decided in 2020 that it would start full membership negotiations with Albania, Bosnia is lagging behind because of persistent ethnic and political divisions stemming from the 1992-95 war.

Russia has backed the separatist president of a Serb-run entity in Bosnia, Milorad Dodik, who has faced U.S. and British sanctions for his policies disrupting Bosnia's postwar unity achieved in a 1995 U.S.-brokered peace agreement.

In Albania, Kallas praised Tirana's alignment with the EU's policies on Russia.

“Your decision to fully implement EU sanctions against Russia alongside your political, military and humanitarian support to Ukraine demonstrates your commitment to our shared values,” said Kallas.

Rama has said he hopes to complete the negotiating process with the EU by 2027 and for Albania to become a bloc member by 2030.

“We will not rest until we step into the door of the European Union, and sit around the same table that the European Union does,” Rama said.

Albania is part of the EU’s growth plan and it is expected to receive more than 920 million euros ($1 billion) over the next decade.

Also Tuesday, Albania signed a 90 million-euro ($98 million) agreement with the European Investment Bank to reconstruct the railway between the port of Durres and Rrogozhine, which Kallas said would serve as a "critical route between Member States and NATO for military mobility in South East Europe, which is extremely important in the current security environments.”

The EU funds consist of a 60.5 million-euro ($66 million) grant under the Western Balkans Investment Framework and a 30 million-euro ($33 million) loan from EIB Global that will help to modernize the 34-kilometer (21-mile) railway line.

The project costs 121 million euros ($132 million), and 30 million euros ($33 million) in co-financing will be provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

“The project will facilitate safer and more efficient and sustainable passenger and freight transportation, contributing to socioeconomic growth and regional integration,” a statement said.

Albania holds parliamentary elections May 11 in which Rama's governing leftist Socialist Party has put EU membership as its goal. The conservative opposition accuses the Socialists of corruption and being unable to take the country ahead.

Jury begins deliberating in Lori Vallow Daybell's trial on charge she conspired to kill her husband

2025-04-22 06:37 Last Updated At：06:42

PHOENIX (AP) — Jurors began deliberating Monday afternoon in the Arizona trial of Lori Vallow Daybell, the Idaho woman with doomsday religious beliefs accused of conspiring to murder her estranged husband in suburban Phoenix.

Throughout the trial that began two weeks ago, the jury heard two vastly different versions of Charles Vallow's death at her home in 2019.

Prosecutors said that Vallow Daybell and her brother, Alex Cox, had planned to kill Vallow so she could collect money from his life insurance policy and marry her then-boyfriend, Chad Daybell, an Idaho author who wrote several religious novels about prophecies and the end of the world.

“What we see is a very planned out, premeditated murder,” prosecutor Treena Kay told the jury Monday in her closing argument.

Vallow Daybell isn’t a lawyer but has chosen to defend herself. She didn’t call any witnesses or put on any evidence in her defense, but said in her opening statement and again Monday in her closing argument that her estranged husband's death wasn't a crime.

“This was a tragedy," she said Monday. "Don't let them turn my family tragedy into a crime.”

Vallow Daybell has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, she would face a life sentence without the possibility of release until serving at least 25 years.

Cox, who said he acted in self-defense when he fatally shot Vallow, died five months later from what medical examiners said was a blood clot in his lungs. Cox’s account was later called into question.

Vallow Daybell said in her opening statement that Vallow chased her with a bat during the encounter and Alex shot Vallow in self-defense after she left the house.

After the shooting, Cox waited 47 minutes before calling 911 “to stage the scene" and leave a bat near Vallow's head, Kay said.

The jury on Monday also listened to a recorded conversation between Vallow Daybell and the life insurance company. Vallow Daybell believed she was the beneficiary of her estranged husband's $1 million policy, Kay said.

In the recording, she is heard saying that Vallow had been shot and that “it was an accident.”

As Kay addressed the jury, Vallow Daybell kept glancing at the jurors.

She has already been convicted in Idaho of killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival, for which she was sentenced to life in prison.

Last week at the Arizona trial, Adam Cox, another brother of Vallow Daybell, testified on behalf of the prosecution, telling jurors that he had no doubt his siblings were behind Vallow's death.

Adam Cox said Vallow’s killing occurred just before he and Vallow were planning an intervention to bring Vallow Daybell back into the mainstream of their shared faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He testified that before Vallow’s death, his sister had told people her husband was no longer living and that a zombie was living inside his body.

Four months before he died, Charles Vallow filed for divorce from Vallow Daybell, saying she had become infatuated with near-death experiences and had claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets. He alleged she threatened to ruin him financially and kill him. He sought a voluntary mental health evaluation of his wife.

The trial over Vallow’s death marks the first of two criminal trials in Arizona for Vallow Daybell. She’s scheduled to go on trial again in early June on a charge of conspiring to murder Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow Daybell’s niece, Melani Pawlowski.