Kanye West in relationship with Miss Universe Albania Angela Martini

Kanye West has a new gal pal: Miss Universe Albania Angela Martini. Sources close to the NEXT Model Management brunette say Martini and West have been seeing each other for a few months, though it's unclear how serious things are.

Where Kosovo treds

Prince Leka of the Albanians spent a 24 hour packed agenda day in Brussels early last week. During this trip he found some minutes to chat with Alia Papageorgiou on Kosovo’s progress, Balkan stability and the upcoming Albanian local elections.

Miss Globe 2008 - Albanian Almeda Abazi teaches Turks how to dance...

Turks can shake their belly but an Albanian is needed to show them that do it wrong! The winner of Miss World, Albnian Almeda Abazi whilst on holidays in turkey she was invited by Turkish television ATN.

During the show she got asked by the host to dance to the song “Dum Tek Tek” by Hadise which is the the song that will represent Turkey in the Eurovision song contest.

The Albanian beauty shocks the audience with her moves whilst the host asked Almeda to teach her the moves.

Almeda Abazi was crowded miss world 2008 the beauty contest. Almeda went to Belek in Turkey on holidays with her family whilst taking a break from modeling.

New Signing

Like another famous soccer coach Gareth Jenkins the Wales rugby supremo has found what he considers to be a vital asset to take the national team forward into the world cup series starting next month. After the teams dismal performances against England and France a new approach was needed.

To combat the criticism of his coaching skills Mr Jenkins scoured the world to find a new star to take to France. Dia the donkey, located in a refuge in Albania, has all the necessary skills required to fit easily in the Welsh Squad.


'Although he was born in Albania, he qualifies because his grandfather was born in a farm in Carmarthenshire' said Gareth.'We managed to get his registration put through the WRU as fast as possible and now he is in training in the Rhonnda.'

When I visited the training camp a couple of days ago Dia looked pretty fit in his Welsh strip. Although his tackling seemed to be a bit weak, his place kicking was superb. Naturally he will look a bit odd on the field as he will face away from the ball at penalties and conversions, as he can only kick backwards. The players seem to have taken a liking to him, and he gets plenty of swedes when he takes a break to keep his strength up.

'He will fit in really well', said the captain, 'he doesn't take much to feed and we have limited his beer intake to 4 pints of SA every day, which is a lot lower than he had back in Albania'.

With their first game only a couple of weeks away we all look forward to Dia's first outing. (TheSpoof)

Dancing in the Street

Take a stroll down Broadway or Second Avenue this weekend and you might run into Albania Mania, an Eastern European orchestra busking among tourists, singer-songwriters and would-be country stars.

Their roll call of instruments includes cello, trombone, fiddle, washtub bin and musical saw, and they speak in broken English with accents of varying thickness, origin and consistency.

Stop for a chat with the accordionist, Joshan, Man of Business, and he might reveal that they’re a musical family of Albanian immigrants.

“We were working for a factory that makes exercise balls and sells them to America,” Joshan says. “And we just stole 100 of them and tied them to our bus, then floated across the Atlantic to become famous and ultimately go back to Albania, our homeland, as superstars.”

The only problem is, the story isn’t quite true. In fact, the band, whose members range in age from 18 to 25, formed in Knoxville. Most are from Tennessee; all were born in the States, and they all live in Nashville. This troupe of mock Albanians—whose size fluctuates from trip to trip, even during a trip, between four and nine people—busk to travel. It’s certainly not for riches, and, as for fame—well, it never hurts to dream.

“When we met, we said, ‘Let’s start playing music on the street,’ ” says drummer Charice Starr, whose Albanian name is Jehona. “I didn’t have my sax and they needed rhythm, so I started playing drums hoping that nobody would listen to me. All I had to do was make a rhythm. Originally [in early 2005], we just played downtown for beer money. And it worked—people gave us money.”

In June of last year they bought a decommissioned school bus at auction, added an extra gas tank so that it could run on discarded restaurant grease and set out to see the western states for as little as possible.

Grease is free—they usually get it from Japanese restaurants, meaning an aroma of tempura follows them—and they quickly learned how to live on just a few dollars a day. “If you only have $2, you’ll figure out how to live with only $2,” explains Joshan, whose legal name is Josh Kaufman. Cabbage, peanut butter and discarded bagels were staples, as well as anything that could be obtained by Dumpster diving. “America’s so wasteful that you can always find a box of apples in a grocery store in the Dumpster,” he adds.

Aside from Josh and his older brother Justin, who both have an extensive musical background, most of the members of Albania Mania joined the group unfamiliar with their instruments, so the music is expectedly ragged. (They have a MySpace page, myspace.com/albaniamaniareally, with samples for the curious, and they’re recording an album now.) It’s a spooky cacophony of weepy, accordion-accented folk songs permeated with old-world melodrama. They dress like gypsies gussied up for a wedding, wearing modest dresses and muted, tight-fitting suits, and they play with absolute earnestness, moaning out lyrics of heartbreak and doom while they lean on their instruments for every ounce of sadness that can be wrung from them. That potential for melodrama is what drew them to the theatricality of Eastern music, and they chose Albania for the same reason, it seems, that Dustin Hoffman did in Wag the Dog. “Who knows anything about Albania?”

Showmanship aside, they are not over-the-top people. “The only way we could like our music was if we had characters to hide behind—people who love America and love the music that we play, who think we’re awesome and just want to be famous,” says Kaufman. “That way we don’t have to do any of these things and can still be self-loathing in private, while in public we can be showmen and hide behind our characters.

“Our music sucks, but we make enough money to live, and you get better as you need more money. Once you start gigging, that goes away. The better you get, the more money you get, and the more comfortable you get, the worse you get.”

The greatest recent expense for the band, whose cross-country travels of the last year have been funded almost totally by busking, has been replacing the bus’s engine, which committed suicide in Savannah just before St. Patrick’s Day. It incinerated while they watched. But rather than split up, the faux Albanians decided to raise the money for the repair, and at the start of June they ended their three months of rest and began traveling again, this time to Chicago, New York and Quebec.

In the end, the bus didn’t make it and was soon abandoned in favor of car travel. But in Montreal they were asked recently to play at an Eastern European music festival in September, so they will be making their way north again soon. In the meantime, they’ll be playing a few “gigs” around Nashville, including downtown this Saturday, in the vicinity of Broadway and Second Avenue.

If all this sounds a little like a musical version of the Borat gag, note that the band’s two greatest ideological commitments are to “public art, definitely, and accents,” according to Justin Kaufman. “You can’t take any of this too seriously, and accents help everything be much sillier than it really is. You want to keep everything as silly as possible.” And despite their abandonment of the bus as the mode of travel, they have not forgotten their founding principles, nor have they lost sight of the fame that only the promised land of America can offer. “We want to be sponsored by Sparks and Oprah,” says Starr. “We want to get famous, because I’m not at college and my parents hate me.” (NashvilleScene, Albania Post, AlbanianTimes)

Fans from the region cheered Mick Jagger and Rolling Stones Monday night in Montenegro

Fans from the region cheered Mick Jagger and Rolling Stones Monday night in Montenegro

Around 55,000 fans from Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Italy attended the Rolling Stones concert Monday (July 9th) at Jaz Beach, near Budva.

The concert, part of the group's Big Bang tour, lasted two hours. Croatian President Stipe Mesic, Serbian President Boris Tadic and Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov were in attendance.

(SeTimes)

Albanian Times: "Sean Paul for the first time concert in Tirana - Albania"

Albania on Fire with Sean Paul – Last night Tirana was burning with reggaeton fans

Tirana: Thousands of reggaeton fans gathered last night at Qemal Stafa Stadium to shake it to the music of Sean Paul, one of Jamaica's top cultural exports and a fixture in recent years on global dance and hip-hop charts.

The concert kicked off with Albanian artists Castro Ziso, DJ Blunt, Tingulli 3NT, STINE, who performed their own mix of soul, rock and reggae with hits from their latest 2006 albums.

But it was Sean Paul this audience was really waiting for, and he finally arrived after an additional 2 hours of a DJ's spinning. The audience pushed closer together to get a better look at the hip-hop and reggae superstar, whose full name remains Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques. The singer, who scored a massive worldwide hit with Beyonce Knowles with the 2003 single "Baby Boy," is the son of a Chinese-Jamaican mother and got his education at Jamaica's Hillel Academy. He's said in the past he's a descendant, through his Sephardic father, of the biblical King Solomon.

Mixing new music with older material in Qemal Stafa, Sean Paul shook his hips for 80,000 fans last night, backed up by four dancers doing their best to keep up. With his on-stage entourage paying tribute to Albania’s music fans at every opportunity, Sean Paul demonstrated he even speaks a little Albanian, too - two words, at least, thanking his audience with a spirited "faleminderit shume!"

The performer made the most of his Albanian visit both before and after his concert, visiting Tirana city center and settling on Tirana’s top nightclub “Calvin”
Following his performance, the singer told concert promoters "Charl's Entertainment" and "Media Art" that he hopes to return to Albania again to stage another concert.

Albanbian fans appeared more than satisfied after the singer's first local show wednesday night, dispersing in high spirits and continuing to sing and dance as they left the “Qemal Stafa”.