Last week, political leaders descended on Bucharest, Romania for the third Three Seas Initiative Summit. Launched in 2015, the Three Seas Initiative is an economic alliance of twelve EU member states between the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black seas. These countries – Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia – are strategically located, especially when it comes to energy and security.
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One of the most ambitious building experiments in history is nearing its end in many former Soviet states. Faced with severe housing shortages in the 1950s due to rapid population growth and urbanization, Soviet planners rolled out their first pre-fabricated, concrete panelled apartment buildings. By industrializing the building process, instead of using time-intensive masonry, housing stock throughout the Soviet block was rapidly expanded in the 1960s with these so-called Krushchyovkas, named after Soviet leader (1953-1964) Nikita Khrushchev.
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In an effort to prop up its official script, Serbia’s parliament is expected this month to bolster a law that makes Cyrillic mandatory in all official government communication and imposes fines on those who do not respect the “mother script.”
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Football in Lebanon continues to be plagued by sectarian violence. The final game of last year’s Alfa One League season between Al Ahed F.C. and Nejmeh Sporting club was played on April 15, 2018 in an empty Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium (capacity: 49,000) in Beirut surrounded by the army and its tanks. The first encounter that season between the two rivals was also considered a “high-risk” match, and was rescheduled at the last moment, at the request of the Lebanese Football Association and Internal Security Forces (ISF).
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Since its independence in April 1991, the former Soviet republic of Georgia has been involved in not one but three armed conflicts. Simmering disputes within two regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, between local separatists and the majority Georgian population, have erupted into widespread inter-ethnic violence and wars.
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On August 12, five nations resolved a twenty-seven-year-old dispute over how to divide up the oil and gas reserves contained in the Caspian Sea. The treaty, signed in the Caspian coastal city of Aktau, Kazakhstan, ends a spat over whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake, and clarifies the maritime boundaries of the surrounding countries.
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An unprecedented violent crackdown by riot police against anti-government protesters in Romania’s capital left many wounded and further escalated the ongoing standoff between the ruling PSD party and the liberal opposition, including President Klaus Iohannis.
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Last month, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court rejected the Istanbul Convention, a treaty intended to prevent violence against women — from marital rape to female genital mutilation –, as unconstitutional. The July 27 ruling likely kills any chance the treaty will be ratified by the Bulgarian parliament.
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Women run Latvia. The Baltic country with 2 million inhabitants is the only EU member state where women occupy the majority of management posts in different enterprises, according to data from Eurostat. Of the 54,540 Latvians classified as managers, 28,778 are women. The fact that women are chief executives, managing directors, sales and marketing managers is not new. Back in 2006, almost 43% of managers in Latvia were female, the highest proportion in the EU.
Read further in WUNRN, Women’s UN Report Network.
Those watching the FIFA World Cup’s final on TV may have barely noticed because producers immediately turned their cameras away from the field, but there was a pitch invasion during the game between France and Croatia. Veronica Nikulshina, Olga Kurachova, Pyotr Verzilov and Olga Pakhtusova, all members of the Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot, managed to run onto the field at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Dressed as police officers, they interrupted the game in the 52nd minute, forcing the referee to suspend play until stewards wrestled the activists off the field. The invasion happened as Russian President Vladimir Putin watched from the stands.
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