Russian village's tightrope walking prowess
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TSOVKRA-1, Russia  - By a quirk of history that goes so far back in time no one really remembers it, nearly every man, woman and child in the remote mountain village of Tsovkra-1 can walk the tightrope.
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DUVANNY YAR, Russia  - Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of treacly mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better.
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BOROVSK, Russia -- Not much was happening in Borovsk, population 12,000, a place of cottages slouching on grassy slopes. Then, five years ago, amateur folk artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov was possessed by a vision that the town should become one giant artist canvas.
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In some remote Alaskan villages, the coastline creeps closer each year, threatening the homes and livelihood of Inupiaq Eskimo, Inuit and other indigenous tribes.
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STAVROPOL, RUSSIA -- Once they were the outriders of the Russian empire, feared and fearless warriors who extended the Czar&#39;s authority as far as their horses would carry them.
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Driving toward this tiny town feels like nearing the edge of the earth, a place of jagged red-rock peaks surrounding dry valleys covered in pinyon trees.
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Friday is when the action happens in this isolated Russian village, six hours&#39; drive north from Moscow along icy roads, past smoggy industrial towns and through vast pine forests.
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DEMIDYV, Ukraine -- Nikolai maneuvered his bike through the ruts in a dirt road and shook his head in disgust. ''Can you call this a civilized country with roads like this?&quot; he said after swerving to avoid a deep mud puddle.
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Smart cars purr along the  streets of Moscow and French chefs run glitzy restaurants in  thriving Russian mining towns, but in the impoverished regions  of Ingushetia and Dagestan people live on a few dollars a day.
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MOSCOW -- Russia's tycoons, whose flamboyant spending has ka-chinged from Mediterranean isles to London's Mayfair district, have found a new use for their supersize wallets: philanthropic foundations.
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In just about any other place, the sight of a man and woman pushing a stroller would be welcomed as a sign of stability and safety. In San Francisco's heavily gay Castro District, some people can't help but think: There goes the neighborhood.
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Centuries-old traditions in Gambell, a village of 700, have been slipping away, as one of the most remote villages on earth finally contends with the modern world.
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MARKHAYANOVA, Russia  - The Kolyma used to be a river of death for prisoners in some of the harshest camps of Josef Stalin's Gulag empire. Now the camps are long gone, but so too is the activity of a once-bustling Soviet Arctic outpost.
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MOSCOW -- At the Danilov Monastery in a grubby industrial section of the Russian capital, the knots of believers inside the high walls share a sense of expectation.
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The Alaskan coastal village of Hooper Bay is about 3,200 miles from North Korea&#039;s intercontinental missile. For some in the Bering Sea town, that&#039;s a bit too close for comfort.
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Miikka Kiprusoff is carrying the weight of a small European country aching for athletic success.
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In this remote and rusting town on the barren steppes of Central Asia, the space race and the Sputnik era seem much more than a memory.