Shorts

Talent And Admirers

Marko Milosevic, the son of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, has shown vast talent for private enterpreneurship. After taking into rent and thus bringing unseen popularity to a discotheque called Madonna in the Serbian provincial town of Pozarevac, which happens to be the hometown of his more famous father, the young heir to privileges provided by the Serbian throne now wants an elite Belgrade night club which has caught his eye. Should the night club of Belgrade's Bitef theatre become the property of Marko Milosevic, those out for a good time in the capital will be able to save some gas and party all night at home rather than drive all the way to Pozarevac.

The business heights reached by the youngster (after an odd fourth place in the rally drivers championship) have prompted a leading techno-dance star of the moment, one Leontina Vukomanovic, to come up with a chartbuster called "The tough guy of our streets" and express her admiration for Milosevic junior.

"I admire Marko, he is unbelievable. He is, in spite of all privileges at hand, one of my few age-mates making his own living and relying entirely on himself, just like me," she said recently.

Well done Marko.

Always Think Twice

The Serbian television set a world record in preparing a press conference report last week. A press conference staged by the Yugoslav Left-Wing Alliance (JUL) on Thursday, September 26 at around 11.00 a.m. was broadcast the next day at 20.00 hours, near the end of the evening news.

One of the newly promoted JUL spokesmen, Aleksandar Vulin, a rising star whose career started with the political rise of the party's leader and president Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, ignored a statement for the press prepared in advance and started his own conference by telling reporters his vision of the JUL election campaign. On the other hand, Vulin said, a delegation comprising some opposition parties will go to the EU headquarters to "file some more complaints about us and ask for more money to support independent media".

Problems appeared when Vulin volunteered to answer any questions the reporters might have, as the ever-ready Serbian state television was caught by surprise: the outspoken JUL official got tangled up with officially "non-existent" issues, among which was the "fabricated" opposition coalition Zajedno and its imaginary leader Dragoslav Avramovic, as well as a strike by workers in Kragujevac which "never happened". Questions about a war which happened recently didn't seem to ring a bell either, not to mention the alleged existence of independent media, one Sulejman Ugljanin, the leader of Moslems rallied by the Party of Democratic Action in the Serbian region of Sandzak.

Who would want to be in the shoes of the editor-in-chief on a day like that? How is a report to be made of all those "non-existent" topics Vulin took the liberty to speak about? The state television's policy that what hasn't been broadcast never happened seemed to come quite handy, but it obviously slipped someone's mind that the conference had been staged by a party belonging to the ruling structures, not the opposition.

The unfortunate individual probably got spanked the next day, when the report was eventually broadcast with a thirty-hour delay. Viewers were actually told that a character called Dragoslav Avramovic does in fact exist, but that's where the story ends.

A Lie Without Precedent

The Trade Union of Serbia's Medical and Pharmaceutical workers intends to sue the Health Ministry and the Serbian Doctors' Association for bringing news that Yugoslavia is about to become the first country with a cure for the AIDS disease. The sensational revelation was made by deputy health minister Zoran Kovacevic at a young socialists' gathering, and carried by the media promptly. The young socialists surely believed what a deputy minister said, but the public, especially those with wider knowledge about the issue, were more than reserved.

It turned out that we are as far away from the cure as we were before the statetemt was made, although Yugoslav experts hope, just like their foreign colleagues, that a cure for the deadly disease will be found one day, if not in the near future.

The trade union statement says: "We would become the centre of the world if we owned the medicament. It would give us more power than an arsenal of nuclear weapons. It is therefore advisable to deceive the public, tell the people to be patient and stick with the current regime, for the world will be at our feet before we even know it. Discovering oil in Turija, copper in the Bor mines and various rare ores on the eve of the previous elections were child's play compared to the latest revelation, whose purpose is to free the impoverished, disoriented and depressed youth from fear of sex and AIDS. After all the cure for AIDS is almost here..."

The union blames the Serbian Doctors' Association for not reacting to what it

called a "lie without precedent".

Exact Gentleness

"Prices have been rising gently for three months now. No dramatic changes are expected in the coming months", assistant Federal statistical bureau director Mirjana Rankovic has said. According to a recent research, prices rose by 1.2 percent in September while basic costs increased 1.8 percent. Although consumers must be thinking that prices never stop rising, they have hardly gone up: the price of industrial products have increased by 2.2 percent, agricultural products and liquor by 0.9 percent, food products by 0.7 percent.

All casts of the population, headed by pensioners, should make a decisive surge on the above-mentioned products; the Tanjug news agency emphatically reports that the remainder of the July pensions are available as of October 1.