The Black Sea

The NGO will also have to pay the court fees of 450 000 lei (€90 000).

Still, participation in a grassroots movement or volunteer campaign does provide civic experience, allows people to unite, teaches them to coordinate their actions, formulate their demands, and interact with the media and fellow citizens. It also leaves them space to speak and act critically at a time when doing so is becoming more and more difficult.

The Georgian Government has announced they are freezing their participation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), after the body voted to accept the Georgian delegation’s credentials on the condition new parliamentary elections be announced.

The vote on Wednesday passed by 114 votes to 13, with seven abstaining. The resolution came in response to widespread electoral violations documented during October’s parliamentary elections in Georgia as well as the violence and prosecutions against protesters, journalists, and civil society figures.

The resolution demanded that by this time, the government must:

• Announce new ‘genuinely democratic’ parliamentary elections;
• Release all political prisoners;
• End police brutality and human rights abuses, and effectively investigate these practices;
• End the misuse of legal proceedings against protesters, journalists, and civil society leaders;
• Revoke the foreign agent law;
• Enable Georgia to resume the European integration process, ‘in line with the European aspirations of the people’.

Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, scientific director of the Institute of Water Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said where the "tongues of fuel oil" in the Black Sea may reach, whether it will be possible to swim in the contamination zone, what will happen to the beaches and animals of the Black Sea

• How much will the spill affect neighbouring countries?

• It should not go to the neighbours en masse. But it can affect Abkhazia, Georgia, Turkey. It can reach Turkey from the east. On the western coast - Romania, Bulgaria. And of course, Odessa and its neighbourhood.

• Have you had any discussions with them?

• Not yet. I don't know, maybe the Foreign Ministry has, but it is unlikely that the Foreign Ministry will do anything without consulting us. But one consideration is that the further away you go, the lower the concentration. That's not much of a consolation.

It seems a stable trend that Black sea news keep getting more industrial and less environmental.

This old article explains the basics

The harmful gas, the byproduct of decay, has been accumulated for centuries. Can we work to remove the hydrogen sulfide content of the Black Sea or at least reduce its concentrations? Scientists have been for quite some time mulling this question on the look out for solutions. All the more so that the otherwise harmful gas is rich in hydrogen that has been increasingly considered as an alternative fuel option with a future.

“I had the idea of using hydrogen sulfide not for the direct extraction of hydrogen through electrolysis as anybody would expect, but rather the direct use of hydrogen sulfide for energy. At the next stage this energy could be used to carry out electrolysis from seawater for obtaining hydrogen.”

And here's a review of most recent research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992305886X

It's not about reputation as the article emphasises. It's about environmental change (due to disaster) and a future change of the way anyone around lives. This holds both for people and wildlife. What is reported now in Asana, will arrive within a year along the whole coastline.

Speaking to the Russian paper Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the head of Russia's State Duma Committee on Family Affairs, Nina Ostanina, said bookings at Anapa's children's recreation and health retreats had plummeted by more than 27% in January and 40% for the summer.

More than a month later, fuel oil continues to leak into the sea from the sunken tanker. Russian authorities have reported that they haven't been able to weld the damaged part of the ship closed, because the hole was too close to the oil storage tankers.

While Russia's Emergencies Ministry has claimed there is no effective method to clean up this type of oil, environmental experts have said appropriate methods have been available since 2002, when the Prestige tanker carrying similar heavy fuel oil sank off the Spanish coast, polluting some 2,000 kilometers of coastline.

Russian officials are warning of further problems in the summer, when rising temperatures cause the oil to dissolve and wash ashore in larger amounts.

But once authorities began pressuring the volunteer center, he starting doubting the official statistics and work practices. Instead, the helper suspects local authorities are trying to cover up numbers and activities.

This is not about ownership of the platform, but about largest sellers on it.

As far as ownership is concerned, it's certainly a Ruskiy Mir saga, as this comment from Kadyrov (yes, he's also involved) illustrates: https://meduza.io/amp/en/feature/2024/10/10/in-first-public-comments-on-wildberries-shooting-kadyrov-declares-blood-feud-against-federal-lawmakers-who-he-claims-ordered-his-murder

It is a process that started before the war, but has accelerated now

By comparison to the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea states lacked strong multilateral structures for cooperation. The North and Baltic Sea got the Joint Expeditionary Force led by the UK, though now all 10 of its members are also NATO members, while Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey failed at creating a NATO flotilla in the Black Sea after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

The military dialogue formats within ASEAN, including cyber military valences as well, are also interesting for observers from the wider Black Sea region. In fact, the more we study the region, the more potential we find in regionally developed models on everything from industrial cooperation to common space asset utilisation for disaster management.

Too many speak of balancing between US and Chinese economic interests, and not enough speak about economic partnerships without geopolitical baggage. This is something that the Black Sea region and the Indo-Pacific can offer to each other, in addition to the obvious advantages such as market access.

There are commercial and investment niches where cross-border exchanges by national actors can have a significant economic and secondary impact. One of these is cybersecurity and digitalisation, both regions featuring strong start-up scenes with important midsized companies that could, with appropriate encouragement, expand into the other region. Yet, one visits growing regional events in South-East Asia such as CyberDSA in Kuala Lumpur and no Eastern Europeans are present (and very few Europeans for that matter, unlike Americans or Chinese).

This is an automated account posting everything from their RSS feed.

Given the few sources of news from the Caucasus, I thought this is an important voice to have.

Two weeks ago he claimed the spill is "smaller than they thought".

By any count, Bulgaria is among the 6 affected countries from the oil spill. Bulgarian maritime.bg remained silent for 30 days. They broke their silence with a report on Putin being upset that the cleanup is not efficient. Whose responsibility is it, comrade Putin?

Even if she left office without confrontation,...

Zurabishvili says she remains the legitimate Georgian president despite being replaced by former soccer player Mikheil Kavelashvili on December 29 by a new electoral college controlled by the ruling Georgian Dream party.

Marine mammals are not exempt from the crisis. In the northeastern Black Sea, an alarming rise in dolphin mortality has been reported. While experts are investigating whether the deaths are directly related to oil exposure, they also point to other potential factors, including toxic ship discharges, missile strikes, and infectious disease outbreaks.

The oil slick, already reaching the western Crimean coast, continues to spread toward Odesa and potentially beyond to the shores of Türkiye, Georgia, and Romania. The spill’s impact is not limited to marine life. Experts caution that fish and shellfish from the affected areas may contain toxic substances, posing risks to local fisheries and food safety.

“This is the largest oil spill in Black Sea history in terms of both volume and area affected,” said Dr. Pavlo Goldin of the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

rfi.fr/ro/interna%C5%A3ional/2…

With protests becoming daily life,the hope is that a national strike would squeeze the government into new elections.

Georgian citizens are being urged to participate in a nationwide strike on Jan. 15 to demand the release of detained protestors and to call for new elections, Protest 24 posted on Facebook.

The strike, organized by Protest 24, will begin at 3 p.m. and last for three hours, with businesses and employees halting work during this time.

Organizers aim to highlight the potential consequences of political isolation, such as economic stagnation, unemployment, and poverty.

The half-buried Bronze Age ruins of Dmanisis Gora perch on a windswept promontory a few kilometers away from a cave where Homo erectus (or a close relative) lived 1.8 million years ago. Deep, steep-sided gorges run along two sides of the promontory, and sometime between 1500 and 1000 BCE, people stacked boulders into a double layer of high, thick walls to block off the end of the plateau from the plains to the west. Sheltered between the 4-meter high, 2.5-meter wide walls and the 60-meter-deep gorges, people built dugout houses, then later aboveground stone ones, along with stone animal pens and other buildings.

Outside the walls lay a more sprawling, less densely packed settlement, sheltered by another wall to the west. That outer wall was as high and wide as the inner ones, and it stretched a full kilometer from the edge of one gorge to the edge of the other. Between the walls, homes and other buildings formed small compounds with open space between them. Fenced fields, animal pens, and graves dotted the area.

This is old news, but it didn't get shared here one month ago, and has relevance not only for the involved 4 countries in the region, but for the world.

It is probably the Cambridge Analytica of Russia. And is almost certainly only one of many such networks.

The total contract volume represents about 1.5% of Germany's gas imports in 2024 and would be the first deal underpinning the long-awaited deepwater project, more than a decade after gas was first discovered in Romania's section of the Black Sea.

Neptun Deep, which is expected to start producing in 2027, holds an estimated 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) of recoverable gas, making it one of the EU's most significant natural gas deposits.

Once it comes online, Romania will become the EU's largest gas producer and a net gas exporter for the first time.

To me it seems that the Azeri and Kurds of Iran are underrepresented.

The Neftochim refinery was constructed within a USSR planned economy and is heavily reliant on Russian crude and infrastructure.

Despite the Russian shady dominance in both Bulgaria and Kazakhstan, this development could be the best chance to circumvent Putin's regime in deliveries and refining of oil from Central Asia.

According to the letter, signed by Tiraspoltransgaz director Igor Lisachenko, Moldova's Moldovagaz offered to facilitate "the purchase of gas from European gas platforms" to meet local needs. However, the response reads, transitioning to non-Russian gas "actually means moving from stable supplies from Gazprom to purchases on speculative terms at much higher and unstable prices."

Currently, Transnistria is receiving no gas from either Russia or Moldova, and Moldovan government officials say the region's leaders have also refused offers of humanitarian aid, including generators.

"I find it extraordinary that given the gravity of the crisis, where schools and kindergartens are shut and people freeze in their homes, the authorities in Tiraspol refuse to accept Moldova’s help," said Aura Sabadus, a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis.

"Instead of working with Moldovan authorities to find the best solution to protect the population at this very difficult time, they prefer to wait for Russian help, which may or may not come," she added. "Moldovan companies have clearly proven there are solutions to solve the issue, with the cost to bring the gas calculated by Moldovans at anything between €20 million to €45 million for this cold season."

Last summer, Moldova's then-energy minister, Victor Parlicov, told POLITICO that Transnistria had been put in a precarious position as a result of changing energy supply routes, but that the Moldovan government continued to fund the separatists' budget with electricity purchases to avoid what he called a "humanitarian crisis."

Geological Engineer Prof. Dr. Osman Bektaş evaluated the natural disasters, especially landslides and floods, which have been seen intensively in the Eastern Black Sea region in recent years. Stating that earthquakes have a triggering effect on the increase in landslides, Bektaş said, "The Black Sea coast should be ready for an earthquake of 6.6 magnitude or higher at any time. The coastal areas are much more dangerous and risky."