The devastating earthquake in Pakistan’s northern mountains is turning into one of the toughest relief operations the world has ever known. Nearly 80,000 are thought to have died and many more are slowly succumbing to starvation, injuries and exposure to freezing temperatures and torrential rain. There has been a fair amount of idiotic political posturing…
Mustafa Kusman at Cavustepe. The small carpark on top of the hill, at the Urartian fortress ruins at Cavustepe, offers an impressive panorama of the surrounding countryside. A lush green plain, between two ridges, is laid out at our feet, sparsely punctuated with the occasional Kurdish village. A small hut at the entrance to the…
This transcript arrived at Polo’s Bastards via an email from Khaleeq Ahmad, the Assistant Spokesman on International Affairs at the Office of The Spokesperson to the President of Afghanistan. It was presented by Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, in London’s Chatham House on 20th July 2005. I’ve taken the liberty of posting it in it’s entirety.…
With a Christian peacemaker on the West Bank HEBRON — At an age when most people are retired or thinking about slowing down, Bourke Kennedy routinely journeys to a part of the world that the U.S. State Department strongly advises American citizens to avoid. For the past decade, Kennedy, 67, has been travelling to the…
I left for Haiti on the 26th of December 2004 to spend two weeks helping out and teaching English at a small but well-established mission. The mission has been in Haiti for over twenty-years. It established a co-op consisting of seven villages, which has proven successful thus far. It also boasts the only work-exchange program…
Strabo at the time of Jesus mentions 26, already ancient, Albani tribes in the Caucasus that, by linguistic argument, included the Chechens (and Ingush). Most of the 55 ethnic groups in the Caucasus mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas speak unique Caucasian languages. Chechen is a Northeast Caucasian language called Veinakh, meaning ‘our…
