News Roundup

I sure hope everybody in Chicago is staying warm! I read an interesting blog post about what people in Estonia are doing to beat the winter blues. In Tallinn, the capital city, they're holding a light festival running for almost a month, where they're going to create as much natural light as possible by creating burning scupltures and seting up light displays all over the city. The website of the festival has pictures of some of the exhibits. 

It would be remiss of me to not to mention the Russia and Ukraine gas conflict. Today is the apparently the tenth day of the "dispute," which is causing most of Europe to be without it's Russian gas supplies. The dispute is over the price that Ukraine is going to pay for the gas. The BBC has an interesting article spotlighting what Europeans think of the whole situation. The Eurasia Daily Moniter has a good analysis with local news reports. 

Also recently, Albania completed the SAA ratification process, which is the final step in the application process to be in the EU, Belarus currancy has been devauled 20.5% against the dollar, and Turkmenistan has upped it's oil production 6% from last year.