The pro-regime media are busy pinning flakey murder allegations on two likely opposition contenders for the presidency – while keeping silent about the more serious allegations hanging over the other two.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is on a high-profile visit to Serbia, which comes in the wake of some of the wildest allegations of espionage seen in the Western Balkans since James Bond was pursued through what was then Yugoslavia on the Orient Express.

Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Shortly after the attacks began, the most powerful man in the world, who had been informed of the World Trade Center explosions in a Florida classroom, was escorted to a runway and sent to the safest place his handlers could think of: The open sky.