Mirjana Markovic

With more than half the votes counted from elections in Yugoslavia, the leftist alliance uniting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialists with the neo-Communists led by his wife, Mirjana Markovic, had 48% of the total, or twice the percentage polled by the four-party opposition coalition. However, the opposition did dent Milosevic's hold on local posts.

Slobodan Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, told the weekly magazine Nacional that her husband's opening speech at the U.N. war crimes trial in The Hague showed that he was "totally superior and relaxed" in facing his accusers. "He is convinced of the truth and he is laying it out in detail, so it is easy for him to be totally superior and relaxed," Markovic was quoted as saying. "People who are lying cannot be that convincing and self-assured."

There are "credible suspicions" that the wife of former President Slobodan Milosevic was involved in the slaying of her husband's predecessor, and she must return from Russia immediately for questioning, Serbian authorities said Saturday. Police came to suspect involvement by Mirjana Markovic in the 2000 killing of former Serbian President Ivan Stambolic while they were investigating the March 12 assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's family was doubly humiliated in Serbia's weekend election, with support for the neo-Communist party of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, crashing even more than for his own Socialists. Based on returns from more than half the polling stations, Markovic's Yugoslav Left, or JUL, won the support of just 0.37% of voters, far below the 5% it had needed to stay in the Serbian parliament, the electoral commission said Sunday.

Mihajlo Markovic is out of a job, recently purged from Serbia's ruling party after daring to disagree publicly with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Markovic's ouster was not surprising; he had fallen from grace some time ago. What made his departure remarkable was the manner in which it came about. Markovic and several other top officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia were dumped during an unusual party meeting last week.

Frustrated by their failure to extract significant concessions from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic despite seven weeks of street protest, opposition leaders Tuesday plotted new in-your-face tactics aimed at pressing their demands for electoral justice.

As tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched through this capital Monday to mark Orthodox Christmas Eve, Serbian student leaders announced a promise from the Yugoslav army not to interfere in daily protests challenging President Slobodan Milosevic. The reported military pledge emerged from a rare meeting between student organizers of the demonstrations and the head of the Yugoslav army.

Chanting "Treason!" and "Let's rise up!" about 15,000 supporters of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic rallied Monday to protest his extradition to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The rally, held in front of the federal parliament by supporters of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia and the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, was the biggest of three pro-Milosevic protests organized since his extradition Thursday.

Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians staged Kosovo's biggest protest in a decade Monday to condemn a brutal Serbian police assault that left as many as 77 people dead in the separatist-minded province. Relatives of many Albanians killed in the sweep refused to claim the bodies, demanding autopsies by foreign pathologists. Riot police with submachine guns sat in buses on side streets as about 50,000 Albanians demonstrated in Pristina, the provincial capital.

A senior Yugoslav official who was a close associate of Slobodan Milosevic's powerful wife was shot to death execution-style Friday in a busy Belgrade suburb, police said. It was the third killing this year to touch the inner circle of the Yugoslav president's family. Zoran Todorovic, a wealthy businessman who headed Yugoslavia's second-largest oil company, was shot to death as he stepped from his Audi outside the firm's headquarters in the capital, radio reports in Belgrade said.