Austria

Bulgaria is able to start building the cancelled South Stream gas pipeline project as early as tomorrow, the country's former Energy Minister Dragomir Stoynev said on Wednesday.

Greece, Hungary, Macedonia and Serbia may sign a memorandum on the construction of a gas pipeline from Turkey to Austria in the autumn, Vedomosti reported on Wednesday, citing a participant in the project

Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Hungary could sign a memorandum to build a gas pipeline from Turkey to Austria, a Russian business daily writes.

This pipeline, to be called Tesla, would represent an extension of Turkish Stream that Russian giant Gazprom plans to build, Vedomosti is reporting, citing sources taking part in the project.

Hungary said on Tuesday will send several thousand police officers to its southern border with Serbia to deter migrant influx, international news outlets reported on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff, Janos Lazar, said the deployment of police was needed because of "increasingly aggressive migrants arriving with more resolute demands," according to AP.

France's Total is preparing to start drilling for oil and gas off Bulgaria's Black Sea coast in early 2016, Reuters reported.

"It depends on the availability of our contractors when exactly we will start, but everything is going according to the plan," Xavier Faugeras, general manager of Total's Bulgaria division, told Reuters on Monday.

Scientists say they have found rare evidence of a prehistoric massacre in Europe after discovering a 7,000-year-old mass grave with skeletal remains from some of the continent's first farmers bearing terrible wounds.
     

More than 500,000 fewer Russians visited Turkey in the first seven months of 2015 in comparison to the same period the year previously, tourism representatives have said, noting the greatest drop-off was seen in the southern hotspot of Antalya.

Today, I was going to write about a couple of modest but positive moves by the Higher Education Board (YÖK), but when President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an said the system had changed, I was more interested in that theme as a law person myself. 

Montenegrin President Filip Vujanovic on Sunday said Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina will be the first ex-Yugoslav republics to sign a border demarcation agreement.

After meeting the President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Covic, in the town of Tivat, Vujanovic said the agreement would be signed  by the end of August in Vienna.

With scenes of thousands of illegal immigrants and refugees flooding the Greek islands of Kos, Lesbos and Leros making the news headlines all around the globe, it is interesting to see what the conditions are for refugees in other EU countries.