 RFE/RL Headlines 08.07.2009 A daily digest of the English-language news and analysis written by the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty |
| News  China's Ethnic Violence Abates, But Mobs Still Roam Han Chinese mobs reportedly attacked two Muslim Uyghurs in separate incidents after strict curfews were imposed. Reports also said riot police tried to disperse a crowd of hundreds of protesters. More  World Leaders To Talk Economy, Iran The world's most powerful leaders are in Italy for a Group of Eight summit set to be dominated by the economic crisis, climate change, and Iran's postelection turmoil. They will also be joined by leaders from a number of developing countries, highlighting a shift of power that has raised the profile of emerging economies. More  Kyrgyz Tighten Controls On Chinese Border Kyrgyzstan has tightened border controls with China after violence in China's western autonomous region of Xinjiang. More  Afghan, French Presidents Thank Kyrgyzstan For Base Kyrgyzstan's President Kurmanbek Bakiev has received letters from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and French President Nicolas Sarkozy thanking Kyrgyzstan for allowing U.S. troops to continue using a base in the Central Asian country for supporting efforts in Afghanistan. More  Syrian President Starts Visit To Azerbaijan Syrian President Bashir al-Assad arrived in Baku on July 8, starting a two-day official visit to Azerbaijan. More A journalist in the Kyrgyz town of Nookat has been hospitalized after being severely beaten, RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service reports. More Moth 1, Ahmadinejad 0 The jokes are flying within the Iranian webspace after Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad failed to deal with a moth during a speech on state television last night. More  Nobody Knows Where Iran Is Going "A lot of us don’t know where Iran is going,” said Farideh Farhi, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and former scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. But she added that the events of the last three weeks represent “the most significant incident in the 30-year history of the republic.” More  The Presidents, The Ideologist, And the Reset U.S. President Barack Obama's overtures to Russian society at the Moscow summit are already causing tremors. A group of prominent Russian civic activists have written an open letter to Presidents Obama and Dmitry Medvedev protesting First Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov's appointment as co-coordinator of a bilateral working group on civil society. More  Is A Formal Karabakh Peace Agreement Within Reach? The French, Russian, and U.S. co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group arrived in Yerevan on July 8 for new talks on resolving the Karabakh conflict. It is their fourth visit to the region this year, and could pave the way for a further meeting later this month between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, who met in late January in Switzerland, in early May in Prague, and in early June in St. Petersburg. More  Shift In Antidrug Policy Draws Mixed Reaction U.S. regional envoy Richard Holbrooke recently announced that Washington will move away from emphasizing the eradication of opium poppy to stem drug production in Afghanistan, and will instead focus on stopping trafficking, enforcing drug laws, and substituting crops. But officials in Kabul are skeptical about the potential success of this strategy. More  China's Uyghurs -- A Minority In Their Own Land? The Uyghurs of western China are an ethnic Turkic people who are by tradition Muslim, and who feel more kinship with the peoples of Central Asia than with the Han Chinese -- the communist state's dominant population. After decades of Han immigration into their region, the Uyghurs are close to being a minority in their own land. More  'Those Days Are Over' Barack Obama's first trip to Russia as U.S. president this week was part of his ongoing overhaul of U.S. foreign policy. In meetings and a major speech, Obama sought to begin overcoming what Washington characterizes as the Kremlin's "zero-sum" approach to relations with the United States. More  Turkey's YouTube Ban Is Cause For Concern Turks have grown accustomed to circumventing the government’s ban on video-sharing website YouTube. But what kind of legal precedent does the ban set – and what does it say about Turkey’s respect for freedom of the media? More |
