Silk Road oasis of Samarkand ages fast
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SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan  - Time flies in Samarkand. This weekend the ancient Silk Road city marks its 2,750th anniversary in grand style, a mere 11 years after celebrating its official 2,500th anniversary.
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It has been a long and winding road paved with 30 years of disharmony.
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The world's longest-running film festival is growing old gracefully
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On the outer edges of southwestern China's Himalayan mountains lies the formerly renowned tea and horse caravan trail which linked the arid plains of Tibet to Yunnan to the south.
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PINGXIANG, China  - At a dusty border crossing on a remote section of the China-Vietnam border, Puzhai looks more like a railway crossing than an entry point into the world's most resource-ravenous economy.
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Afghanistan and Iran open a major road link as part of reconstruction efforts aimed at boosting trade.
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Our heavy-browed competitors lasted 2,000 years longer than previously thought, a new cave find suggests&#151;though not everyone agrees on the dates.
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Excerpt from report by Tajik Avesta website on 22 June  Dushanbe, 22 June: The biggest chemicals producing enterprise in Central Asia - the Tojikkhimprom [Tajik Chemical Industry] limited liability partnership - has been sold to the British Enjik Chemical Company LTD.
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F   atima     Gailani  is used to waiting. After living in exile for 24 years, working for her embattled country out of a suitcase, the 50-year-old Afghan has mastered the virtue of patience by never losing hope. Saturday's presidential election in Afghanistan is an important milestone along that journey, she explained, though she knows steep obstacles remain.
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Eradicating Afghanistan's   surging opium production and weaning poor farmers from growing   the raw material for heroin will take at least 10 to 15 years,   the country's president said on Thursday.
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A controversial rail link has led to record numbers of tourists visiting Tibet, Chinese state media reports.
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Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels &#151; up by more than 40 percent from 2005 &#151; despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press.
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SHANGHAI -- Saul Marmer, a retired Cincinnati shoe retailer, peeled away from his tour group the other day to reflect on a special moment in Shanghai's long and eventful history. As summer rain bathed the city, and its residents raced about in their relentless drive to accumulate wealth, Marmer, 79, ducked into the Ohel Moishe Synagogue.
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DASHTAK, Afghanistan -- The village of Dashtak sits on a bumpy, washed-out specter of a road, an hour's drive off the main highway between Kabul and Afghanistan's lawless southeast.
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Underneath the homes and ragged streets of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan lie the remnants of a glorious Jewish past: coins, seals, a water tunnel hewn by a Judean king 2,700 years ago, a road that led to a biblical Temple.
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TAXILA, Pakistan Just off the Grand Trunk Road, in an old auto yard filled with rusting axles and rotting trees, Arshad Mehmood is completing his latest masterpiece.
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Millions of Afghans prepared for a historic poll on Saturday, which will give the mountainous Islamic nation on the ancient Silk Road its first elected president and perhaps end over a quarter century of war.