Grappling with widespread poverty and the need for cash to finance multi-faceted reforms, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration in Georgia is pumping up gambling as a revenue solution. For now, though, foreign investors don’t like the odds of success.
On a recent, cool March morning in a village near Bishkek, 20 Austrian tourists boarded an aging helicopter for the 30-minute flight to 4,000-meter-high peaks. Over the course of a week, they each pay over $4,800 for 12 hours of flight time in the Kyrgyz Air Force Mi-8MTV, giving them access to some of the world’s best heli-skiing.
As Armenia’s summer vacation season winds down, one country, Turkey, will be missing from many of the usual travel tales. With Armenia’s attempts to reconcile with Turkey now at a standstill, Armenian tourists this summer largely bucked the trend of recent years and gave Turkey’s sun-drenched beaches a miss.
The German city of Essen, representing the wider Ruhrgebiet region, is one of Europe’s capitals of culture in 2010. The EU-sanctioned designation is enabling Germany to showcase the social and economic transformation of an area that just a few decades ago threatened to become a Rust Belt.
At the top of a craggy mountain in the Altai range, a man raises his fist to reveal a golden eagle with a six-foot wingspan. The eagle spies its mark in the valley below and bolts into the air. Within seconds, the bird slams into its target, dust billowing.
