After a long, cold winter for the Nabucco pipeline project, March has brought a fresh wave of energy to the long-stalled Western plan to diversify Europe's natural gas supplies.
Kazakhstan has a unique problem. It's long on land and short on the people to farm it.
The Central Asian country is huge -- about six times the size of France -- but has less than one-quarter of France's population -- just 16 million people.
Fears of swine flu led the Turkmen government to ban its citizens from participating in this year's hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia that every able-bodied Muslim is required to make during his or her lifetime if able to afford it.
"First Lightning," a 22-kiloton nuclear bomb, exploded at 7 a.m. local time on August 29, 1949, at the Semipalatinsk testing site in northern Kazakhstan.
It's been an up-and-down year for the Nabucco natural gas pipeline.
Just as work on the long-stalled project seems set to finally begin, some shift -- usually at the hand of Russian energy giant Gazprom -- alters the commercial landscape and Nabucco's chances appear to recede.
With the resignation this week of a cabinet minister widely regarded as the "gray cardinal" behind its current president, Turkmenistan has lost the last of the old guard installed by the late strongman Sapamurat Niyazov.
