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Members of the besieged government of Kyrgyzstan suspect that Moscow precipitated the violent upheaval that has swept the former Soviet republic in Central Asia. Already scores of people have been killed and hundreds more wounded after troops opened fire on protesters, who in turn overpowered the police, stormed and looted government buildings and forced President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to flee the country. On Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denied any involvement by his country in the turmoil after his Kyrgyz counterpart said that Putin gave the go-ahead to the revolt. But whether or not the Kremlin urged the Kyrgyz...
...already fled the country, and the opposition says it is forming a new government. How amenable that government would be to the U.S. presence in Kyrgyzstan remains to be seen. What is certain is that the struggle for influence between Russia and the U.S. may again heat up in Central Asia...
...tasked with doing the investigations are the same people who have financial interests in the mines themselves," says Crothall. "You can't really rely on them to do a thorough or independent job." Mining usually pays much better wages than farming, and in some parts of China's central northern coal belt, the taxes paid by mines make up the bulk of local government revenues...
...bloody protests that erupted this week in Kyrgyzstan, leading to scores of deaths and injuring hundreds thus far, have paralyzed the small Central Asian country of 5 million people and likely toppled its ruling government. According to some reports, Kyrgyz President Kermanbek Baikyev fled the capital Bishkek on Wednesday to rally support in his home region of Jalalabad. Bakiyev, who came into office in 2005 as a champion of democracy and reform, has been accused of corruption and rigging elections last year. Foreign observers also see the hand of Russia in recent events - with Moscow eager to reassert its traditional...
...near the modern day town of Talas - where it's reported anti-Bakiyev unrest first broke out on Apr. 6 - a vast army sent forth by the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad defeated an expeditionary force of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. Historians suggest that this decisive battle solidified Central Asia within the orbit of the Muslim cultural world rather than that of China. It also marked an epochal moment in human history: as the story goes, war prisoners taken to the city of Samarkand were compelled to set up a mill to produce a key Chinese invention: paper. That product would...