After twenty years of growth, labor shortages threaten to derail the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Since the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, their economies have been boosted through a combination of capital from multinationals and cheap and well-educated local workers.
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The European refugee crisis is officially over. That was the message of the European Commission when it presented its annual progress report on migration in Brussels earlier this month. “For 3 consecutive years, arrivals figures have been steadily falling, and current levels are a mere 10% of what they were at their peak in 2015,” the Commission wrote.
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Two years after the massive persecution of sexual minorities, a new crackdown on LGBTQ people in Russia’s Chechnya region appears to be in the making. In January, two queer people were killed and nearly forty detained, as reported by the Guardian. The cause of death was allegedly police torture.
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In many ways, World War I was a watershed when it came to women’s political rights. Before the war, women had the right to vote in only a few countries. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world in which women won the right to vote, although in Sweden some women had voting rights since the 18th century. The first female members of parliament were elected in Finland in 1907. Yet thanks to the suffragette movement – the 1910s saw the first International Women’s Days –, women’s contribution to the war economies, and revolutionary worker’s movements around the world, many national parliaments adopted universal suffrage during or following the war.
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Eloy Domínguez Serén is the director of the documentary film “Hamada”, about the daily life of three young Sahrawis in the refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria. With vitality, humor and unexpected scenarios, the film paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a camp in the middle of the stony Saharan desert. “Hamada” premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) on November 15, 2018 and has since screened at film festivals in Gijón, Spain, where it was awarded Best Spanish Film and Best Spanish Director, and Porto, Portugal, where it received an award for Best Emerging Director. I spoke with the director the week before the premiere of “Hamada” at the IDFA.
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Excerpt in Spanish (Cineclub Calle Mayor).
Following Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Moldova, no party secured a majority, which may mean the former Soviet republic remains caught between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces. The vote on February 24 was a three-way contest between the pro-Russian Socialists (PRSM, 31.1%), the ruling Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM, 23.6%), and the pro-EU opposition ACUM bloc (26.8%).
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‘Sex at last!’ was the headline of an article in the German weekly Die Zeit about the opening of the first sex shop in Leipzig, East Germany in June 1990. These were the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a country whose citizens “were not allowed to show themselves naked or see the naked bodies of others, except at the nudist beach.” “The workers and peasants,” the article went on, “could only practice voyeurism under the covers of the marriage bed.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall, Communism and the impending unification were giving them, at last, the opportunity to make up for lost time, according to the article’s author.
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The stunning defeat of Japan by the Qatari national men’s team in the Asian Cup final took the world of football by surprise. After defeating Lebanon, North Korea, South Korea, and regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Maroons went into the final on February 1 with a 16-0 goal differential, and ultimately beat the Japan side 3-1. Japan is a four-time winner of the tournament and placed third in the Asian Football Association (AFC) ranking. Coming into the tournament, Qatar was ranked outside the top 10 in Asia, and at 93 in the FIFA world ranking.
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2018 ended on a high note: the gender gap in Romania continues to close. According to new figures from the renowned World Economic Forum, Romania has closed the overall gender gap to slightly more than 71%, which places Romania 63rdin the global ranking, just behind Croatia (59), Kazakhstan (60) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (62) but quite far behind our neighbours Bulgaria (18), Moldova (35) and Serbia (38).
Read further [in Romanian] in Dilema veche.
A new report on how EU member states address the legacy of the Holocaust claims that several Central and East European countries are seeing widespread historical revisionism and are downplaying of World War II crimes. The report was published two days before January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered.
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