MARY PROVINCE, Turkmenistan -- For Bagul, a 35-year-old mother of three struggling to make ends meet in one of Turkmenistan's most fertile regions, farming means survival.
Until recently, Eduard Khil hardly ever ventured onto the Internet. Now the 75-year-old spends much of his time sifting through the avalanche of fan mail flooding his e-mail inbox.
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.
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.
Ainagul is 58 years old. A native of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, she has been married for 34 years and has four children and several grandchildren. Her husband, an ambitious manager during the Soviet era, went on to start his own business and became a devout Muslim.
Internet users in Azerbaijan began experiencing problems accessing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Azeri-language website the day after the news service posted its coverage of a Washington Post story about alleged real estate transactions involving the children of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the head of the station's Azerbaijani service tells EurasiaNet.
Lying 1,600 meters above sea level in the "Heaven's Mountains" of eastern Kyrgyzstan, the glistening waters of Issyk-Kul have long been a point of national pride and global ecological significance.
Like many other farmers in the remote village of Barchid, lying in the shadow of Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains, Makbulsho Yakinshoev knows little about issues like greenhouse-gas emissions or global warming.
But the 65-year-old Tajik farmer knows what he sees, and for years he has seen his fruit and vegetable harvests decline as the glacier that looms above his village retreats.
