Neil Bowdler is a multimedia editor at RFE/RL.
It's 70 years since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being when 12 countries agreed to come to each other's defense should any of them come under attack. RFE/RL takes a look at its Cold War origins, its first battles in the Balkans, and its latter embrace of former foes.
The gusli, an ancient Russian musical instrument, is finding new audiences. A 30-year-old Russian entrepreneur set up a factory in his hometown to build them. Sergey Gorchakov and his craftsmen create handcrafted instruments based on old drawings of the gusli but have also developed new models.
It's been 70 years since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being when 12 countries pledged to defend each other should any of them come under attack. RFE/RL takes a look at NATO's origins, and how Soviet expansionism and its objections to a United Nations force, led to its creation.
Construction workers in the Belarusian city of Brest have unearthed a World War II-era mass grave thought to contain the remains of over a thousand murdered Jews from the city's ghetto. The building works have now stopped and the remains are being exhumed.
Tourists visiting the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster have left so much litter that volunteers have been dispatched to clear it up. Radiation levels in the area around the former nuclear plant in Ukraine, though much higher than natural levels, have dropped considerably over the decades.
The final round of Slovakia's presidential elections take place on March 30, with environmental lawyer Zuzana Caputova expected to defeat Maros Sefcovic, who is backed by the country's ruling party. She's campaigned against corruption, toxic waste, and spoken up for the country's Roma population.
A group of Afghan artists have put up cardboard cutouts of leading Afghan women across the country in support of women's rights amid ongoing peace talks between Taliban militants and the U.S. government. They say women's freedoms must be protected as part of any future peace deal.
Late last year, RFE/RL met Shehla who lives in a village near Peshawar in northern Pakistan. She dressed as a man so she could work on local building sites to pay the rent. Now, thanks to donations from RFE/RL's audience, she's set up a business selling women's clothing door-to-door.
On a village farm in northern Pakistan, it's not just the workers but the manager who is a woman. Thirty-year-old Sahar Iqbal and her husband inherited the land, and she now manages 100 full-time female workers.
A Kyrgyz woman has described how she was drugged and attacked by a group of men after they discovered she was transgender. The first sex-reassigment surgery was performed in Kyrgystan in 2014, and Kyrgyz citizens can now change their legal gender, provided they have undergone surgery.
Camel wresting remains popular in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland with bouts attracting large crowds and owners competing for sizable prize money, despite the sport being illegal in the country. Animal welfare activists say the fights are cruel.
Moscow's Lyublino homeless shelter provides refuge from the Russian winter and offers a thousand beds to the needy. It and five smaller shelters across the capital have helped reduce winter deaths, but some have criticized the push to keep the homeless away from the capital's center.
A blind Russian man is offering blindfolded tours of Yekaterinburg to people who can see. Vladimir Vaskevic says the tour gives people a chance to enter his world and to experience the Russian city through touch, sound, smell, and taste.
Elaborately decorated vehicles are common across Pakistan. The "truck art" features political leaders, animals, or landscapes, and has even captured attention abroad, with galleries showcasing the work.
The legal onslaught by prosecutors against Jehovah's Witnesses continues across Russia. In Kirov, two members of the Jehovah's Witnesses have been placed under house arrest after being released from jail to care for sick relatives. Russia's Supreme Court banned the organization in April 2017.
The Russian prosecutor’s office has begun an investigation into accusations of illegal whaling. Activists claim 87 belugas and 11 killer whales, which are being held near Nakhodka in Russia’s Far East, have been captured for sale to aquariums in China rather than for legal scientific purposes.
The number of children in the village of Shapy, in the Smolensk region of western Russia, was dwindling in the mid-2000s with the local school about to close. That's when three teachers decided to adopt five children. Then others got involved and now 70 adopted children live in the village.
The "Space Museum" in the small Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy is housed in a 19th-century Orthodox church. It's one of many buildings that were repurposed or destroyed as part of an antireligion campaign during the Soviet era. It now houses artifacts including a lunar rover.
In Krasny Sulin in Russia's Rostov region, an amateur theater company set up by the founder of the town's ironworks is still performing, almost a decade after the plant was shut down and broken up for scrap.
Muscovites are getting angry about their new sidewalks. Many of the city center's walkways are being redone, but the stone tiling has already become badly uneven in many areas. Residents and officials disagree on whether it's poor construction, the tiles used, the weather, or corruption.
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