For more than a week the Romanian capital, Bucharest, and other large cities have seen mass protests against a proposed gold-mining project in the Transylvanian village of Rosia Montana. The historical and cultural impact aside, what shocks and angers many are plans by the company to use thousands of tons of toxic cyanide in the extraction process.
The first Asian championship in kokpar, or buzkashi, was held in the Kazakh capital. Teams from Afghanistan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan competed for the headless goat carcass.
Artisans from all over Moldova have been taking part in the National Pottery Fair in the Nisporeni region.
In Afghanistan, the national soccer team received an ecstatic welcome home on September 12 after defeating India 2-0 in the South Asian Football Federation championship. President Hamid Karzai congratulated the team at Kabul's airport and crowds gathered in the center of the city to cheer the team's arrival. It was a marked contrast from the days of the Taliban, when sports were harshly restricted and stadiums were used for executions. (RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan)
It's been 60 years since Nikita Khrushchev's rise to power as head of the Soviet Union. Under his leadership, the USSR launched bold reforms like the cultural thaw and the Virgin Lands campaign. It also jump-started the space race and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis.
In an isolated part of the Caucasus, a monk is spending his days in prayer and silence atop a 40-meter pillar of limestone in western Georgia (near the town of Chiatura). The Katskhi Pillar was used by stylites -- Christian ascetics who lived atop pillars and eschewed worldly temptations -- until the 15th century when the practice was stopped following the Ottoman Empire's invasion of Georgia. For centuries the pillar was abandoned and locals could only look up at the mysterious ruins on its summit. Finally, in 1944, a mountain climber ascended the pillar, discovering the skeleton of a stylite and the remains of a chapel. Shortly after the collapse of communism and the resurgence of religion in Georgia, former "bad boy" Maxime Qavtaradze (now 59) decided to live atop the pillar in the way of the old stylites. “When I was young I drank, sold drugs, everything. When I ended up in prison.... It was time for a change. I used to drink with friends in the hills around here and look up at this place, where land met sky. We knew the monks had lived up there before and I felt great respect for them." In 1993 Maxime took monastic vows and climbed the pillar to begin his new life. "For the first two years there was nothing up here so I slept in an old refrigerator to protect me from the weather." Since then Maxime and the nearby Christian community have constructed a ladder to the top, rebuilt the chapel, and built a cottage where Maxime spends his days praying, reading, and "preparing to meet God." As a result of the interest in the site there is now a religious community at the base of the pillar. Men with troubled lives come to stay and ask for guidance from Maxime and the young priests who live at the site. The men are fed and housed on the condition they join the priests in praying for around seven hours per day (including from 2 a.m. until sunrise) and help with chores. (19 PHOTOS) Photos by Amos Chapple. --> https://www.facebook.com/amoschapplephotography
The Afghan Premier League (APL) is playing its second season of professional soccer after a successful debut year. Players from the eight teams in the APL live together in a large communal house in Kabul where they eat and sleep during the seven-week season, earning about $9 per day.
The redeveloped site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan includes the new National September 11 Memorial Museum, dedicated to documenting the impact of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their continuing significance. The museum is scheduled to open to the public in the spring of 2014.
Photographer Kamil Chutuev has been photographing his native Daghestan since the 1970s. His photographs appeared in a recent exhibition in Makhachkala, "Planet of Daghestan," in which several photographers' work maps the cultural and natural landscape of the Caucasus republic over many years.
China has 2.7 million U.S.-dollar millionaires and 251 billionaires, according to "The Hurun Report," a financial publication. But the UN states that 13 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 per day. The Chinese government has pledged to double household incomes over the next decade in a bid to close the country's wealth gap. which is now so wide that it threatens social stability.
Some of the most compelling photographs from RFE/RL's broadcast region and beyond. For more photo galleries, see our "Picture This" --> http://www.rferl.org/archive/rferl-photo-blog/latest/16235/16235.html archive.
Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny held the final rally of his campaign for Moscow mayor on September 6. His election campaign office said some 15,000 people gathered at Moscow's central Sakharova Avenue. The rally kicked off with a rock concert. (12 PHOTOS)
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