Yelena Isinbayeva is coming home, and another world record is looming.

While reading your report about the Altai gathering of liberal and semi-liberal economists, a few things caught my attention as either utter ignorance or purposeful misrepresentation of commonly known facts and easily accessible information -- with almost all of the incidents attributable to former presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov.

In Minsk, where the buildings are gray, the weather dour and the architecture Stalinist monumental, the lights and colors of dissent are challenging the last dictatorship in Europe.

Ramzan Kadyrov is the new prime minister of Chechnya. The Kremlin seems to have adopted a hands-off policy, apparently reasoning that since the war in Chechnya is officially over, it has no business appointing the prime minister of a peaceful republic. The presidential administration doesn't appoint the prime minister of the Ivanovo region, after all.

Wednesday morning in Dushanbe, I received an SMS from Babilon, my Tajik cell phone company: ""Our women are beautiful and lovely! Congratulations on the March 8 holiday, and we wish you luck and love.""

When the new Labor Code went into effect in February 2002, many believed that it spelled the end of alternative trade unions.

Thousands of women from villages and cities across patriarchal Asia took to the streets Wednesday for International Women's Day to press for freedom, equal rights and an end to discriminatory laws.

A leading Russian health researcher on Tuesday warned that the country had no stockpile of anti-viral drugs capable of controlling a possible bird flu pandemic, despite assurances by government officials that such a stockpile was being prepared.