An agreement between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to exchange prisoners will come into force in April.
The agreement was signed in February, 2009, and later ratified by the states' respective parliaments. Ratification certificates were finally exchanged on March 19, paving the way for the agreement to come into force within 30 days time, local media outlets have reported.
Mongolia calls itself the land of blue sky, but for seven long months each year, a thick cloud of smog hangs over the capital, Ulaanbaatar. Seeking to improve the quality of life for the city’s approximately 1 million inhabitants, local bankers and development organizations are striving to combat pollution at its main source - suburban family homes.
Health authorities in Uzbekistan felt obliged recently to deny the existence of any order on the forced sterilization of women, saying surgical contraception is performed only as a last resort and only at the patient's request.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development will provide $100 million to underwrite plans to remove an arterial railway line from central Tbilisi and to construct a new line that will skirt the Georgian capital.
Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian believes that Ankara's threat to expel up to 100,000 illegal Armenian migrants from Turkey is tantamount to blackmail.
Baku would accept a proposal to define the status of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave through a referendum, but only if the poll is held on the entire territory of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov announced on March 18, the APA news agency reported.
Agriculture Minister Esenmurat Orazgeldiev, who was appointed in January 2006 not long before then-president Saparmurat Niyazov died, was sacked because of "shortcomings in his work," the state news agency reported on March 17.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on March 16 received Russian opposition figure and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, a vocal critic of Saakashvili's archenemy, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In a fresh blow to the troubled Turkey-Armenia reconciliation efforts, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to expel as many as 100,000 Armenian immigrants from Turkey.
