Bankwatch blog

Unsuccessful in making a coal power plant reduce abhorrent pollution levels, the village of Golemo Selo, Bulgaria is trying to “move” to a new municipality, hoping to have more say in matters concerning its citizens’ health and livelihoods.

Enver Hoxha, the former communist dictator in Albania, ruled in such a bizarre way that he found himself ostracised by other communist rulers. Among others he flooded the country of 3 million people with 750 000 concrete bunkers. Those bunkers were built ignoring people, nature but also military rules - as some of them were facing each other.

We are passing through the canyon of the river Vrbas, in north-west Bosnia-Herzegovina. I am looking through a car window, mouth wide open in awe. While I look up to the rocky, edgy peaks hundreds of meters above and down to the heavenly blue river, I am wondering why anyone would want to dam this river, flood the canyon and destroy its beauty.

Then again, rather than seeing beauty, hydropower companies see wasted water resources, or in the words of a Bosnian official “euros flowing away in vain.”

The Court of Appeal of the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine sided with community activist Nina Martynovska from the Ratseve village who was brutally beaten because of her opposition to the construction of poultry farm facilities by Peremoha Nova, a subsidiary of Ukrainian agribusiness giant MHP.

The court decision from April 12 thus confirmed an earlier ruling by the Chyhyryn district court that the incident was related to “a conflict [...] over the chicken farm” between the victim and the attacker.