Charles Recknagel is standards editor for RFE/RL.
China proved its economic might while most others were laid low by global recession.
Divisions between developed and developing countries are threatening to derail climate talks in Copenhagen. At times the divisions appear eerily reminiscent of the Cold War, with Russia and China championing the developing world's demands that the world's richest countries shoulder the heaviest burden for reducing emissions.
Does broad public interest in climate change mean we're more united over what to do?
This week's UN Climate Change Conference has all the elements of a science-fiction thriller. It's a global meeting aimed at averting a threat to the entire planet. And the menace, if most scientists are right, is growing greater and nearer with each passing decade.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has become the first Western government leader in years to travel to Belarus, considered a pariah by the West. The trip is partly a matter of diplomatic protocol. But it may also be a chance for Berlusconi to explore better Western ties with Minsk while representing little risk for the EU.
Washington says that Iraq's national elections, scheduled for January, could be postponed due to a continuing dispute in Baghdad over the election law.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says antiviral medicines like Tamiflu should be used much earlier by doctors in order to prevent deaths from swine flu. The UN agency also says it is sending more supplies of antivirals to developing countries most affected by swine flu. Those countries include Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine.
The coming years could see the price of natural gas fall as demand weakens but new supplies keep flowing into the market. That is according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) published today. The annual report, which is used by many governments to help set energy policies, suggests that major gas exporters like Russia, Iran, and Qatar will be particularly affected.
As concerns over massive outbreaks of swine flu rise in many countries with the onset of the influenza season, doctors say much is misunderstood about how people contract the disease. We speak to experts to learn more, and whether there is any cause for panic. RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel reports.
Public fears of a major outbreak of swine flu are growing in countries from Ukraine to Afghanistan. What is not clear is how many cases are actually the dreaded H1N1 strain, and whether fears of a pandemic are justified.
Can local forces help turn the tide against the Taliban? Washington is looking at that possibility as it weighs a new strategy for Afghanistan. The model is the success of tribal forces in marginalizing Al-Qaeda in Iraq. But many Afghans say turning to local militias can be a risky business. We look at why in this second of a two-part series on local militias in Afghanistan.
For eight years since the U.S.-aided toppling of the Taliban, the residents of the Qala-i-Zal district of Konduz Province have relied on Afghan government forces for security. Now, with a resurgent Taliban, worried local officials have taken matters into their own hands.
Deputy UN envoy to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith was dismissed from his mission earlier this month after accusing the top envoy there, Kai Eide, of concealing information about the extent of fraud in the country’s contested election. In a new twist, Galbraith himself is now at the center of a new apparent scandal. A Norwegian newspaper reported that Galbraith acquired shares in an Iraqi Kurdish oil field at a time when he was a leading diplomatic voice in the U.S. debate over the structure of post
Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdish region has stopped exporting oil in a dispute with Baghdad. The regional government says that it will contribute no more oil to the Iraqi government's oil-export program until disagreements are resolved over who is responsible for paying foreign oil companies operating in the Kurdish region.
Germans went to the polls after months of campaigning focused on economic issues. But there was another topic that increasingly made its way into the political debate this year despite being long considered a no-go area.
With Western eyes focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghan's south and east, security in the previously peaceful north has dramatically worsened. Taliban numbers are growing, too few Afghan forces patrol, and German troops sent for reconstruction are reluctant to switch to a full combat role.
The Obama administration is at a crossroads in its strategy for Afghanistan. The top U.S. commander there has called for more troops, warning that the war in Afghanistan could be lost to the Taliban without them. But U.S. President Barack Obama says he wants more time to consider all the variables in the Afghan problem before making an immediate decision.
Can Afghanistan's nascent free press act as a gadfly to prod the country's famously slow bureaucracy to act on forgotten cases? One radio listener hoped so and called in with a curious request. The listener -- an Afghan citizen imprisoned in Tajikistan -- wanted the show to look into what happened to a year-old agreement to repatriate Afghan prisoners to their home country.
Demonstrations taking place amid an official march in support of the Palestinian cause are the first since police and vigilantes intimidated the opposition off the streets with mass arrests two months ago.
Did former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher secretly not want Germany’s reunification on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall? That’s the conclusion from a report today in "The Times" newspaper of London. The report is based on copies of Kremlin records smuggled out of Moscow in the early 1990s by a young Russian researcher.
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