WASHINGTON -- Each year around this time, millions of would-be immigrants to the United States from around the world hold their breath. Early May is when the U.S. State Department releases its shortlist of applicants to the annual green-card lottery. About half of them -- 55,000 people -- will receive permanent-residence visas, the tickets to eventual citizenship.
The focus of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s May 16 talks with US President Barack Obama may be on Syria, but with public rage growing in Turkey over two deadly car bombs in the Syrian-border town of Reyhanlı, the chief aim of the discussion now may be how to limit a potential Turkish domestic backlash.
Officials and lots of citizens in Kyrgyzstan are reeling from news that the Central Asian nation’s most hated son will continue living a free and comfortable life abroad.
Three 19-year-old students who attended university with the surviving suspect in the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon have been charged in connection with the case.
Dias Kadyrbaev and Azamat Tazhayakov from Kazakhstan were charged on May 1 with conspiring to obstruct justice.
News that the suspected perpetrators of the April 15 Boston marathon bombings have links to Kazakhstan – albeit extremely tenuous ones – has brought unwanted attention to this oil-rich Central Asian state neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where the two suspects have family roots.
Last Monday I was on Boylston Street, having just completed my first Boston Marathon, when the bombs detonated. As is so often the case in the digital age, I may have been just a couple of hundred yards from the epicenter, but in the immediate aftermath, people watching on television and following via social media knew far more than I about the unfolding horror.
Half a world away from Massachusetts, a small town in Kyrgyzstan is reeling from the news that two of its own are suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings.
The government of Azerbaijan, backed by activists abroad, is engaging in a campaign to gain international recognition of the 1992 massacre of over 400 Azeri civilians by Armenian forces in the village of Khojaly during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Central Asian states do not face an “imminent” threat posed by Islamic militants, but they need US assistance to help defend against potential dangers, according to top US diplomats. Such assistance, it appears, may include drone aircraft delivered to Uzbekistan, which democratization watchdogs rank as one of the most repressive states in the world.
Narcotics use is wreaking havoc in Russia, responsible for 30,000 annual deaths and 200 new HIV infections every day. But Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is letting knee-jerk hostility toward the United States cloud its response to the drug-trafficking crisis.
