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There are few events in human history as ominous — both in name and impact — as the Black Death. The bubonic plague pandemic made its way across Eurasia and north Africa between 1346 and 1553. It's estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, or 60 per cent of the Earth's entire population at the time. Now, scientists believe they have pinpointed the origin of the Black Death to a region of present day Kyrgyzstan called Issyk-Kul, once a stopover on the Silk Road trade route in the 14th century. Its place of origin has been one of...

(at 10:42, video contains an ad Curiosity Stream, YouTube seems to have redacted from the transcript, which skips from 10:41 to 11:04)The Aral Sea: The Toxic Soviet Sea | 23:46Geographics | 1.05M subscribers | 1,782,979 views | February 13, 2020

Central Asian countries are attempting to curb Russian recruiting of their citizens for its war in Ukraine, while Moscow seeks to avoid stirring public discontent with another large wave of domestic mobilization. So far this year, Kyrgyzstan has sentenced one citizen to 10 years in prison and detained another for allegedly serving as mercenaries. In Kazakhstan at the end of July, a prosecutor's office in a region bordering Russia warned citizens about the proliferation of online ads urging them to join the war, noting stiff legal penalties for doing so. This came a few months after Kazakhstan's National Security Committee...

The State Department awarded a $30,000 grant to an organization that promotes the transgender ideology in the mostly Muslim nation of Kyrgyzstan. The grant from the State Department, which was given to an organization called Kyrgyz Indigo, was intended to “prevent gender-based violence against the transgender community and increase acceptance through sensitivity and advocacy trainings, and media campaigns.” Kyrgyz Indigo calls itself the “largest LGBT+ human rights and advocacy organization in Central Asia” and partners with organizations like Amnesty International and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Russia's decision to pull its forces back from the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson was "positive and important," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said. "Russia's decision regarding Kherson is positive, an important decision," told reporters in the capital Ankara on Thursday before leaving for a summit of Turkic countries in Uzbekistan. Vowing to maintain dialogue with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Erdogan's comments came after Moscow ordered its troops on Wednesday to withdraw from Kherson to the east bank of the Dnieper River. "I don't know whether there will be Russian participation in the G20 or not. We'll have...

Vladimir Putin was given a stern dressing down by the president of Tajikistan in another indicator that the Russian dictator has lost respect and influence in his own backyard. Fellow longstanding dictator Emomali Rahmon, ruler of the Central Asian state of 9 million since 1994, seized upon Putin's woes back home and in Ukraine to give him a piece of his mind and tell him how he really feels during a summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana. A glum and awkward looking Putin slouched back in his chair and took the seven minute tirade as a host of Central...

The Tajik side said in a statement that Kyrgyz border guards opened unprovoked gun and mortar fire on their outpost, killing one border guard and injuring another two, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. Kyrgyzstan did not immediately report any casualties. More than one-third of the two countries’ 1,000km (600-mile) border remains disputed. Both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are allied with Russia and host Russian military bases, but fighting over border issues is frequent and last year almost resulted in an all-out war between the former Soviet republics. Russia called on its Central Asian allies to take urgent measures to bring...

Tehran (AsiaNews) – Iran will become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the signing of the memorandum of obligation at a summit in Samarkand, on 15-16 September. “This year, within Uzbekistan's chairmanship, Iran, as an observer state will ... become a full-fledged member of the SCO,” RIA Novosti quoted Uzbek Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov as saying yesterday during a meeting in Moscow. Iran took one step closer to full membership on 17 September last year when its application was accepted 15 years after it was made. On that date, SCO began the country's accession, which usually...

Incredible video shows an avalanche of rocks and snow cascading down a mountain in Kyrgyzstan directly toward the hiker filming the spectacle. A group of 10 tourists - nine Brits and one American - who were caught in the avalanche in the Tian Shan mountains managed to avoid serious injury, but ended up with a great story and astonishing footage. Advertisement "It was only later we realised just how lucky we'd been," wrote Harry Shimmin. "If we had walked 5 minutes further on our trek, we would all be dead." Shimmin's video of the avalanche has racked up 900,000 views...

A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in...

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: It might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world. Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site. "We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The Black Death...

Romania and the United States have signed an agreement that would establish the first U.S. military bases in an Eastern European country from the former Soviet bloc. The United States already has the rights to a base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, and is in the process of vacating one in neighboring Uzbekistan. With the United States already possessing a military presence in much of the world, what does it want with even more foreign bases? Washington, 7 December 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Romanian President Traian Basescu seemed as pleased to be hosting the bases as the Americans are...

The central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan suffered electrical power outages in major cities on Tuesday, according to authorities and residents, after a major power line in Kazakhstan was disconnected. The grids of the three ex-Soviet republics are interconnected, and via Kazakhstan are linked to the Russian power grid which they can use to cover unexpected shortages. But Kazakhstan's North-South power line, which links densely populated southern Kazakhstan and its two neighbours to major power stations in northern Kazakhstan and the Russian network, was disconnected on Tuesday morning due to "emergency imbalances" in the Central Asian part of...

DURING 15 years of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, Dimitri Gerasimenko was starved and repeatedly beaten. The indignities did not end with his death five years ago at the age of 30.Staff at the ramshackle asylum 50 miles from Bishkek, the capital, have never told his mother Raisa, 65, how he died. All her attempts to retrieve his remains have been met with prevarication, compounding her grief. “First I was asked for money if I wanted the body back,” she said. “Then I was told Dimitri had been sent to a medical academy. When...

August 11, nine Chinese workers were killed in a blast in Pakistan, the latest in the string of attacks targeting Chinese citizens. The incident highlighted the vulnerability of Chinese nationals and assets abroad and the need to improve protection and security for workers in foreign countries. As a solution, China has come to see private military companies (PMC) as an eminently necessary tool. PMCs and Chin Though first emerging in the 1990s, the need for Chinese PMCs became clearer from the 2000s onward. This is because threats to China’s international ambitions grew in tandem with the country’s economic impact and...

Dong Jingwei, who has been rumored to be a high-ranking defector to the United States, attended a meeting in Beijing on June 23, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MPS announced on its website that Dong participated in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security meeting in Beijing on Wednesday, as a member of the China team which was led by Zhao Kezhi, China’s public security minister. In the announcement, the ministry released a photo, in which Dong was sitting at the right end of the table. This is the first time that the Chinese regime has...

On the surface, Kyrgyzstan is one of the world’s poorest nations, but just beneath the ground it holds almost unimaginable wealth. Carved high into the side of the Tien Shan mountain range, the Kumtor gold mine was built to extract that wealth, making the Central Asian nation, and the Canadian firm behind the project, rich in the process. Instead, the vast mine, one of the world’s largest, has become the center of a long-running political row. In May, just weeks after being inaugurated as the country’s president following violent riots last October, Sadyr Japyrov ordered officials to roll in and...

TEHRAN – Iran is set to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which currently consists of China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The SCO leaders will meet in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, September on Tuesday. President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran will participate at the summit. Iran’s membership of the organization is set to be endorsed in the summit. So far Iran has been an observer member. Mehdi Safari, the former Iranian ambassador to China and Russia, has said that with Iran's permanent membership in the SCO, the West will understand that the space for Iran...

On Monday, June 21, Turkish President Recep Erdogan said that his recent meeting with US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels opens a "new era" in diplomatic relations between the two countries. According to Erdogan, there are no problems in relations between Turkey and the United States that cannot be solved, and there are much more areas for cooperation. Biden expressed the hope that countries can make real progress. At the same time, the parties did not agree on problematic issues, such as the acquisition by Turkey of Russian S-400 anti-missile systems, violation of...

At least 31 people have been killed, scores injured and 10,000 evacuated after a water dispute led to some of the worst clashes in years on a disputed Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border. Clashes started on Wednesday when people from both sides hurled stones at each other after surveillance cameras were installed at a water facility. Pictures published on social media showed some buildings on fire in the region, in a disputed area around the Batken region of Kyrgyzstan. Among the burned properties were a border post, more than 20 homes, a school, eight shops and a casino[!!], according to the Kyrgyz emergencies...