Transnistria...

"Sometimes it is hard to get solid news about Transnistria"? It is always hard to get solid news about Transnistria. But now I have heard of it three times in the past week--the only times I have heard about it in the past two years, first in a Walter Jon Williams story about human photosynthesis, then in a lunch conversation over the state of eastern Europe, and now Doug Muir:

Transnistria: underwater?: It’s sometimes hard to get solid news about Transnistria. No international news agencies report regularly from there, and it doesn’t have a good English-language site. News stories about the breakaway state tend to come out of Russia, Moldova or Ukraine, often in the local languages. So it’s not clear what impact the recent flooding is having there.... Since Transnistria is basically a thin sliver of low-lying land along the bank of the Dniester river, you would expect they’d have problems, but it’s not easy to find out what’s going on....

Meanwhile, Itar-Tass reports that Ukraine has decided to release a huge amount of water through their Novodnestrovsky hydroelectric dam. If this happens, Transnistria might have to evacuate about 50,000 people — roughly 10% of its population. That should be interesting.

I mentioned there are no good English-language sites for Transnistria. But there are several bad ones, most notably the Tiraspol Times and the Deciphering Transnistria “blog”.... [T]hey’re bogus in interestingly different ways. The Tiraspol Times is more classically Soviet, with lots of headlines like “To Transnistria’s plan of peace, Moldova responds with plan of war”. The Deciphering blog is more vaguely lefty anti-globalist why-can’t-we-all-be-friends-ish. They’re both drawing from the same well, but they’re using different buckets. I mention this because the Tiraspol Times has, so far, completely ignored the floods — 10% of the country’s population may be displaced, but their headline today is about how Moldova is destroying press freedoms — while Deciphering has an angry article about how the whole thing is Ukraine’s fault...

Comments

[shah8]

It strikes me as very odd that we were both reading A FistFull of Euros at the same time, roughly so...

I thought that article was interesting, but the really great one is the subtitle one...

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/culture/sunday-morning-lifeblogging-adventures-in-european-subtitling/

I was searching the european blogs about italy's Roma situation...