Daisy Sindelar is the vice president and editor in chief of RFE/RL.
Russia’s announcement that it had caught an alleged American spy came as the U.S. ambassador, Michael McFaul, was launching a Twitter Q&A session open to the Russian public. McFaul continued the event, but any hopes of engaging on a wide variety of topics were quickly derailed by a wave of questions about the spy case.
World health experts have expressed concern about a new virus that has claimed 18 lives in the Arabian Peninsula and spread to France, Britain, and Germany. The so-called coronavirus is closely related to SARS, which killed some 800 people in a global epidemic in 2003.
Stefan Fuele, the European Union commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy, has called on the EU-hopeful countries of the Eastern Partnership and the Western Balkans to do more to prove their commitment to democratic values. Correspondent Daisy Sindelar spoke to Fuele during his visit to RFE/RL headquarters in Prague on May 9.
The Serbian Orthodox Church has formally removed from duty a powerful 74-year-old cleric bishop implicated in a sex scandal allegedly involving orgies and the rape of underage boys and girls.
In the United States, one of the most successful campaigns in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights is "It Gets Better," an online video project aimed at offering messages of hope to young people struggling with life as a sexual minority. Now the campaign is going worldwide with more than a dozen affiliates, including the first in Eastern Europe, in Moldova.
The past year has seen a sharp crackdown on sexual minorities across the former Soviet space. But tiny Moldova has emerged as an exception – with new laws, marches, and video campaigns all supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.
A new documentary film looks at how the people of the South Caucasus continue to deal with the consequences of the region's violent past. The film, "Memories Without Borders," looks at ordinary people living in often extraordinary circumstances, in Nagorno-Karabakh, Baku, southern Armenia, and Istanbul.
Longtime Uzbek leader Islam Karimov has been conspicuously absent in recent days, fueling rumors that he has suffered a severe heart attack. The speculation has sparked an old debate about who would replace him.
Vuk Jeremic, Serbia's former foreign minister and the current president of the UN General Assembly, has built an ambitious political career on the strength of his image as a Serbian nationalist. But that appeared to change on March 18, when Jeremic publicly embraced his Muslim roots at a ceremony honoring his Bosniak great-grandparents.
Azerbaijan is the latest country where riot police have threatened to use a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), against protesters. The U.S.-manufactured LRAD has been sold in 60 countries worldwide, but its emerging role as a crowd-control device has drawn controversy.
When Azerbaijani riot police forcibly dispersed opposition protesters in Baku on March 9-10, they did so with the aid of tear gas and other crowd-control weapons -- many purchased from the West. Now angry activists are asking how countries like the United States can provide weapons used against protesters while being a prominent critic of Azerbaijan's human-rights record.
Serbian snake lover Predrag Ristic died in a motorcycle accident last spring, leaving behind an invaluable collection of rattlesnakes, vipers, and constrictors that was believed to be the largest in Southeastern Europe. Now, 25 of Ristic’s snakes have been donated to a zoo in Croatia.
A new exhibition set to open on March 4 at the Sotheby’s auction house in London will offer a sale of nearly 50 works of Soviet and contemporary art from Central Asia and the Caucasus. For the artists, it’s an opportunity for exposure and profit. And for Sotheby’s, it’s a chance to find potential new clients among the post-Soviet super rich.
Health organizations say the rising number of female smokers in Kazakhstan is part of a worrying regional trend. But some Kazakh women defend their right to choose and say that if men can smoke, why can't they?
In Baku, a crackdown continues against a writer whose latest novel has raised hackles for its sympathetic portrait of Armenian suffering at the hands of Azerbaijan. Beneath the uproar, however, a quieter dialogue is emerging.
The Chinese New Year, which begins on February 10, marks the start of the Year of the Snake, one of 12 zodiac symbols on the Chinese astrological calendar. The new year is raising alarm in Russia, a country where many turbulent moments in the country's history have consistently occurred during so-called snake years.
Government officials in Kyrgyzstan are threatening to scrap an agreement with a Canadian-run gold mine they say is bilking the country out of millions in tax revenues. But with the Kumtor mine serving as one of the single-largest contributors to Kyrgyzstan's struggling economy, Bishkek must proceed cautiously -- or risk losing a vital cash cow.
Outspoken Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky is calling for legislation that would impose fines or dismissals on journalists, teachers, and writers who use foreign words in place of Russian.
They say good fences make good neighbors. But Central Asian residents watching a barbed-wire barricade go up between their Ferghana Valley villages may not all agree.
Did Scandinavian telecoms giant TeliaSonera pay Gulnara Karimova upwards of $300 million in bribes in order to break into the Uzbek mobile-phone market?
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