Montenegro is preparing for the EU–Western Balkans Summit to be held in Tivat on Friday. The Serbian regime allegedly sent a group of 90 people on a charter flight to provoke incidents. Montenegro’s Agency for National Security sent them back to Serbia.
I am the Minister of Strategic Investment for the Republic of Albania.
People ask why I signed the island over before there was a business plan. I tell them this is how a small country gets chosen.
The daughter swam to it. This is true. She swam out from the yacht, touched the rock, and swam back, and by the time her towel was dry the matter was, in the parlance of my ministry, under active review. We do not require a survey when a principal has already conducted one in person.
For fifty years we were the place that hid. Enver poured three thousand bunkers into that one rock so we could vanish from the earth and outlast an invasion that never came. Now the son-in-law of the American president wants a spa where we kept the submarines, and you want me to wait for a feasibility study?
The feasibility study was written by a firm in Tirana. I will not tell you who registered that firm last spring. I will only tell you that it found the project feasible.
Strategic investor status is a beautiful instrument. It makes the ordinary rules a courtesy, and we have chosen to extend that courtesy to a man whose fund carries two billion dollars from Riyadh, money his own advisers flagged as too vast for someone so green and burdened with fees too steep for someone so unproven. They wired it regardless. Abu Dhabi added to it. Doha added more. The only due diligence anyone ran was on the surname, and the name came back clean.
The park is protected, yes. It was guarded from the world like a relic under glass. Now the world pays four thousand a night to step inside the case, and that is the superior protection. The kind that wires.
My cousin handles the catering. My brother-in-law owns the sole firm on this coast that pours concrete to specification, and these days the specification is simply whatever he pours. Call it nepotism if you like. I call it keeping the value at home. The Americans have a tidier phrase in their glossy reports. They call it local content. I possess an enormous quantity of local content. Everyone in this story is, you understand, extremely local.
The Americans adore the bunkers. The gas masks they love most of all, the genuine ones, Soviet, still scattered in the weeds where the conscripts dropped them and ran. The resort presents one to each guest at check-in. I assured the developers it was tasteful, a tribute. I neglected to mention that my nephew walks the field at dawn and sells the masks back to the resort at nine euros apiece. Local content.
SPAK opened a file on the approvals. A committee of the United States Congress opened a second. Let them both read. An indictment is merely a nation taking itself seriously, and seriousness is a luxury we can finally afford, because we have become a destination. No one audits a place that no one wants.
There was a woman with a map of the seal caves. The breeding caves, she kept repeating, as though I had never studied the map myself. She attended three hearings. She missed the fourth. I hear she found other work, somewhere inland, somewhere without a coastline to defend. The seals will adapt. They always adapt. In thirty years I have never once watched a seal lodge a complaint, and I have watched every other creature in this republic do nothing but.
The Serbians attempted their own version. The Belgrade army headquarters, the one NATO flattened in 1999, a protected war monument until a quiet little law unprotected it, and the same heir meant to raise a hotel from the wreckage. It died last year in a scandal. I rang my counterpart to console him, and the lesson I carried away from that call was simple: the only difference between corruption and investment is whether the doors ever open. His stayed shut. Mine will swing wide.
And then a young man from the fund told me, over a long dinner, that Sazan is the pilot.
He is a real estate person at heart, he said, just as the son-in-law is one. It is all about location. Had I ever reckoned how much breathtaking land on this earth simply idles there, burdened with history, crowded with people, waiting for the right eye to see what it might become? He tilted his phone toward me. White towers. A marina. A long bright beach with not a single soul upon it. Where is this place, I asked.
Gaza, he said. After.
After what, I asked, and he only repeated the word, after, the way my own ministry murmurs under active review, and he showed me the next slide, which was the same beach with the people still on it, and that slide was titled Before, as if a people were a phase a property passes through.
He told me Sazan settles the argument. A coastline can be cleared of its history and sold back at four thousand a night, and the world will book it for an anniversary. Gaza is merely the bigger lot. The son-in-law has said the waterfront is very valuable. He has sworn there is no Plan B. Do you know what a man means when he swears he has no Plan B? He means Plan A is already pouring concrete.
That was the moment I understood what I am. My island is not the destination. My island is the showroom. Sazan is the tidy little model you walk the buyer through before you drive him to the parcel that still has families asleep in it. We are the demonstration unit. We validate the concept. We prove that a place raised so a frightened people might outlast the end of the world can be photographed, priced, and handed to the very people who schedule the endings.
My grandfather poured a bunker on that island with his own hands so that we would survive being forgotten. He braced that door shut against the whole of the earth. I signed one page, in good morning light, so that we would never be forgotten again. I am the man who opened the door. I want to be precise about the distinction, because people keep mistaking the two of us.
He kept everyone out so we could live.
I let everyone in so I could.
We open for the summer in June. Nearly sold out. Even the bunker. They tell me the next site will be larger, and warmer, and that the building was never the difficult part.
The difficult part is always who is standing on the land when you arrive.
Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating a luxury resort project linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as protests from citizens and environmental organizations over the development persist.
https://t.co/aaeDIQApis
Mendime Bajrami: pasi arsyeja e vetme pse po rimbahen zgjedhjet eshte moszgjedhja e presidentit, partite ne programet politike keto zgjedhje duhet me i ofru ne rend te pare qendrimet e tyre per zgjedhjen e presidentit. Jo zgjedhje pa zgjidhje.
COORDINATE ME 2026
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në Prishtina Hackerspace
Po mblidhemi për të kontribuar në Wikidata në kuadër të garës ndërkombëtare të gjeolokimit COORDINATE ME 2026.
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Serbian students would like to reclaim Kosovo. However, standing in their way is this truck, which was found in the Danube in early April 1999. It was filled with the bodies of Kosovo Albanian civilians - killed by the Serbian state.
A e ka ndërtuar një gjakovar një nga 4 xhamitë e mbetura osmane në Hungari?
Porositësi i saj quhet Hasan Pashë Jakovalia, nuk ka informacion nëse ishte nga Gjakova ose Dakovo (Kroaci). Zëri nga Wikipedia në koment.
Total Jobs Created by Party (1989-2026):
Democratic Presidents
50,600,000
Republican Presidents
1,469,000
The biggest scam the GOP has ever pulled off is convincing people that Republicans are good for the economy.
UN treaty body CERD confirms systematic discrimination against Albanians in the Presheva Valley:
• Suspension of permanent addresses, blocking renewal of IDs and passports and restricting political, civil rights
• Widespread hate speech and negative stereotyping in the media
A Harvard professor spent 24 hours preparing every single lecture, filmed all of them, gave them away for free, and quietly made himself the most influential CS teacher in history without charging a dollar for any of it.
I watched the first lecture at 1am and immediately understood why every self-taught engineer I respect has mentioned this man's name.
His name is David Malan. The course is CS50.
Here is the part of the story almost nobody tells you.
In 1996, a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named David Malan walked into a lecture hall to shop a class called CS50. He was a Government concentrator with a vague interest in constitutional law. He had never written a line of code in his life.
He took the course because a friend dared him to and because the instructor that semester happened to be Brian Kernighan, the man who co-wrote the original textbook on the C programming language.
By the end of his sophomore year, Malan had switched his concentration to computer science. He has said in every interview since that the course did not just teach him to program.
It rewired his entire understanding of what intellectual work could feel like. He used to walk back to his dorm in Mather House on Friday nights actually excited to start the weekly problem set.
Eleven years later, in 2007, Harvard handed him the keys to the same course that had changed his life. Enrollment that semester was 132 students. The course had a reputation on campus for being difficult, dry, and only worth taking if you were already certain you wanted to be a computer scientist.
Most students who had taken it for years described it the same way. They were impressed. They were exhausted. They were not transformed.
Malan kept everything that was rigorous about it. Then he tore down everything that made it inaccessible.
He rewrote every single problem set so that the assignments connected to actual things students cared about. Cryptography became a problem set about decoding real messages. Data structures became a problem set about reconstructing memory from a corrupted image file. Algorithms became a problem set about searching genealogical databases. Same content. Completely different relationship between the student and the work.
He restructured the lecture experience so aggressively that journalists started writing about him as a performer. He shredded a phonebook on stage to demonstrate binary search. He hired a lighting director from the American Repertory Theater. He brought in guest speakers like Mark Zuckerberg.
He opened every single lecture with the same three-word incantation: "This. Is. CS50." And he walked into Sanders Theatre for the first time wearing a black sweater and jeans, looked directly at the audience, and convinced 282 students that semester that they were about to be part of something none of them would ever forget.
Enrollment doubled in his first year. By 2011, the course had over 600 students. By 2014, it was the largest course at Harvard, period. Female enrollment grew by 48% in a single year. Students who had never touched a computer were sitting next to lifelong programmers in the same lecture hall, working on different versions of the same problem set, both of them rewarded for the level they were actually at.
Then Malan made the decision that turned a Harvard course into one of the most consequential education projects of the century.
He made it free.
In 2007, he started recording every lecture and putting them online. In 2012, he launched CS50x as one of the first major courses on the new edX platform. Then he uploaded everything to YouTube. Every lecture. Every problem set. Every walkthrough. Every section. Every short. The entire course that costs Harvard students roughly $80,000 a year to attend in person became available to anyone on Earth with a phone and a working internet connection. For zero dollars.
Over 5.8 million people have now taken it through HarvardX alone. The YouTube lectures have been watched tens of millions of times beyond that. The course is now officially taught at Yale and at the University of Oxford, both of which built their own versions on top of Malan's recorded lectures.
The thing he said in his recent interview that stayed with me the longest was about who actually takes the course now. He gets thank-you notes from prisoners who watch the lectures on smuggled smartphones. He gets emails from a Google employee who started in a non-technical role, took CS50 on the side, taught himself programming through the problem sets, and now builds AI systems that read medical scans for radiologists. He gets messages from teenagers in countries with no functional computer science education who finished the course and got hired as software engineers a year later.
Susan Wojcicki, the late former CEO of YouTube, took CS50 her senior year as a humanities concentrator. She said for the rest of her life that the course changed everything about how she thought. The platform she eventually ran is the same platform that now hosts every lecture of the course she took, available for free, to a billion people who never had to be admitted to Harvard to learn from the same professor she did.
The man teaching does not have tenure. He runs the course on a five-year renewable contract. He is technically a Professor of the Practice, which in academic terms is a slightly lower-status title than the research professorships that dominate the rest of the Harvard faculty. He does not publish papers in volume. He does not run a research lab. His entire job is to teach one introductory course, again and again, to anyone who shows up.
He has been doing it for 19 years.
The most useful thing I have ever heard him say, and the thing that explains why the course works so well, is that he refuses to assume any prior knowledge in the room. He treats the absolute beginner and the experienced programmer with the exact same respect, because his belief is that the only difference between the two of them is when they happened to start. The beginner is not behind. The beginner is simply earlier in the same sequence.
The most expensive university in the world quietly produced the most accessible computer science course on the planet, and the professor running it was once a 19-year-old Government student who did not know what a variable was.
Most people scrolling past CS50 on YouTube right now will never click on it. The ones who do will quietly join a community of millions of self-taught engineers who decided that the credential mattered less than the knowledge.
The classroom door was opened twenty years ago.
Almost nobody walks through it.