The festival will be organized by the efforts of Mongolian Association in Ujinbu.

Golomt and Khaan Banks, headhunted in Ulaanbaatar, together with Seoul Global Center and two Korean lenders Woori Bank and Shinhan Bank announced will sponsor the cultural event, infoMongolia.com reports.

South Korea is the largest labor market for Mongolians. Estimates suggest that 38,000 to 40,000 Mongolian’s currently live and work in Republic of Korea. The country now has more Mongolians than Japan, Europe and the US combined.

At the same time, compared to other Asian countries, Mongolia has a relatively small overseas diaspora.

The government of South Korea estimates that one out of every two urban households in Mongolia has a family member working in South Korea.

According to South Korean government figures, 40 percent are residing in the country illegally; other estimates of the proportion of illegal migrants run as high as 70 percent.

Most Mongolians in South Korea are migrant workers employed in heavy industry. Some also run small restaurants, trading companies, and grocery stores in Seoul.

Aside from migrant workers, Mongolians come to South Korea to pursue higher education –around 2000 Mongolians annually. Remittances from Mongolians working in South Korea have become an important source of income to this nation of 2.7 million.

Mongolian women also come to South Korea as the brides of men they met through international marriage agencies; their average age is just 24.9, whereas that of their husbands is 44.5, and many are more educated than their husbands, according to the figures of Asian Workers News.

Mongolia’s trade with South Korea has almost quadrupled over the last decade and the Asia’s fourth biggest economy is now the third largest trading partner of the resource rich country after China and Russia.

According to the Foreign Investment and Foreign Trade Agency of Mongolia, South Korea is the 4th largest investor in Mongolia with total FDI of over US$255 million since 1990.

South Korea is also a key donor who has provided approximately US$137 million since 1990 in committed loans and grants to Mongolia.

The Metsamor nuclear power plant is only 20 miles from Armenia’s capital and most populous Yerevan city. Its location in a seismic zone has drawn renewed attention since Japan’s nuclear crisis, NatGeo magazine said in its article “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”

The power plant Metsamor was built in 1979 and closed in 1989 after an earthquake prompted officials to reconsider the safety of the location.

On December 10, 1988, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck, killing 25,000 people. Some 60 miles from the epicenter, Metsamor, then with two operating reactors, survived the earthquake without damage, according to Armenian officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In 1996, one reactor resumed operations with Western financial assistance for upgrades. Then in 2003, Russia’s state-run power monopoly, Unified Energy System, took over operations in return for Moscow’s cancellation of a US$40 million debt.

Despite the upgrades to the plant, Antonia Wenisch of the Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology in Vienna said that “the overall safety has not improved sufficiently.”

Armenian officials remain confident that their antiquated nuclear power plant can ride out any Japanese-sized tremor. Of course, they have little choice but to believe in its infallibility, The Moscow Times speculates.

Metsamor provides Armenia with more than 40 percent of its energy consumption, and the country has very few alternative energy resources.

Seven years ago, the European Union’s envoy was quoted as calling the facility “a danger to the entire region,” but Armenia later turned down the EU’s offer of a US$289 million loan to finance Metsamor’s shutdown.

Since the EU failed to persuade Armenia to close the plant, it has focused on providing aid for improving its safety, spending more than US$85 million on such projects as well as for renewable energy, and regional energy cooperation efforts.

Armenia has made efforts to obtain other sources of fuel, such as a natural gas pipeline from its southern neighbor Iran, which opened in 2007. But the amount of fuel to be imported remains in question. The conduit poses potential competition to Russia, a country on which Armenia remains highly reliant, for everything from nuclear fuel to grain.

The 3 million people of landlocked Armenia are unique in their energy dependence on one aging nuclear power reactor.

Azerbaijan to the east and Turkey to the west closed their borders with Armenia, cutting off most routes for oil and natural gas.

Armenia has been forced to store spent fuel on-site for 22 years because of a blockade by its two neighbors.

The broadcasting operations are going to close in Serbian, Portuguese, Macedonian, Albanian, and English in Balkan republics Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

Only the agency’s web sites, featuring online broadcasts in languages mentioned above will remain in operation.

BBC already has closed its services in Bulgarian, Slovenian and Croatian.

“I can’t advise the British government on how it should spend its money, but this is a sad thing,” Leonid Gozman, co-chairman of the pro-business Right Cause Party, said to The Moscow Times by telephone.

“Now we are able to listen to variety of radio stations, but possibly a day will come when we would again have to turn to foreign radio stations for the truth,” Gozman said.

The Russian Service began broadcasting to the Soviet Union in 1946 and quickly established a reputation with Soviet listeners, in the brief period before the onset of the Cold War.

From 1949 until 1987, the jamming of the signal by the Soviet authorities consumed vast amounts of money and technical expertise. For many years, a significant part of the USSR’s entire radio broadcasting system was devoted to blocking transmissions from abroad.

According to the BBC Europe, despite Soviet jamming, millions were listening to BBC radio broadcastings in Russian by shortwave during the Cold War. The total audience reached 6 million by 1999.

In its heyday, the Russian Service provided a full range of news and current affairs, analysis, musical, medical, scientific, cultural and religious programs. In the past week, the Russian Service has revived some outstanding material from the archives: an interview with Paul McCartney and a ground-breaking hour-long, live studio interview with Margaret Thatcher, answering questions from listeners across the Soviet Union.

Among the service’s most popular programs was music show “Rok-Posevy” (”Rock Seeding”), hosted by iconic rock journalist Seva Novgorodtsev since 1977. He was awarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 Queen’s New Years Honors List for his services to broadcasting.

“Unlike many other ‘enemy voices,’ the BBC dedicated more time to music and culture,” political analyst, and a long-term listener, Stanislav Belkovsky said. For him the first hook was even more exquisite — a show dedicated to 17th-Century English philosopher Francis Bacon.

The closure was not entirely unexpected after the Russian BBC left the FM broadcast band in 2007, switching to middle waves and losing a chunk of its audience in the process.

“I think we have already lost the majority of our audience, when we switched to medium waves. I don’t think so many people will notice the disappearance,” a BBC Russian Service employee told to the Russian business daily Vedomosti.

However, the BBC is planning to concentrate in TV programming in Indian languages like Urdu, Hindi, and in Sub-Saharan Africa in the days to come with additional funding.

The BBC is aiming to cut expenses by 16 percent by 2014, when its current government grant ends. Axing the foreign-language broadcasts is expected to result in net savings of £46 million (US$74 million) – and the loss of some 30 million listeners worldwide, the broadcaster said in a January statement.

According to Amnesty International information, about 300 people gathered in the city’s Fountain Square for a rally held by the Musavat opposition party. Several people were also detained on their way to the event by the police.

“There is no justification for heavy-handed tactics to be used against obviously peaceful protestors,” said Natalia Nozadze, Amnesty International’s Azerbaijan expert who was present at the protest.

Demonstrators chanted “Liberty” and called for the resignation of the president and also called for the release of imprisoned activists.

The opposition activists sent out more than 35,000 invitations for people to support the anti-government group on Facebook and more than 3,000 clicked the “I’m attending” button to support the Friday action.

Observers sound skeptical of a Near-Eastern scenario to be repeated in Baku. But Friday’s protests rattled the authorities enough to cause a wave of arrests that made the regime look both vicious and fearful.

Police said 43 people were detained near the Oil Academy, a major university in central Baku.

Azerbaijan, an energy supplier to Europe and a transit route for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has been ruled by one family for nearly two decades since Soviet veteran Heidar Aliyev came to power in 1993. He was succeeded by his son Ilham in 2003.

The removal of autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt is being felt in other Central Asian countries as well.

Run by an aging tyrant Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan is nervous too.

State media in Uzbekistan, the only media permitted in the country, has been attacking both Muslim extremists and Western “satanic” rock and roll. This kind of music is created by “evil forces” and is “approaching as dark clouds over the heads of Uzbek youth,” the Radio Free Europe quoted local media as saying.

Meanwhile, in a sign of both corruption and anxiety, last year Uzbeks became the second-fastest growing nationality purchasing luxury residential properties in London. The Moscow Times reports average sale amounts to US$3.3 million.

While Russia has benefited from the turmoil in the Arab world due to the surge in the price of oil, China is worried about its own internal tensions in Tibet and Islamic Turkic-speaking Xinjiang, and at the same time China depends on Central Asia for a considerable portion of its energy needs.

China buys a lot of natural gas from Turkmenistan. Lately, China has been turning to neighboring Kazakhstan for more of its energy needs — 40 percent of its uranium, for example. China National Petroleum Corp. is developing gas deposits in western Kazakhstan for direct export to China via a pipeline under construction.

“But the problem is that a good percentage of energy shipments over land have to enter China via Xinjiang, which can easily become unsafe if disturbances break out,” Richard Lourie, the author of Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, said to The Moscow Times.

Early Monday the state electoral commission said Lukashenko had won 79.7 percent with Sannikov, his closest rival, garnering only 1.6 percent.

Belarus police Monday arrested hundreds of protestors. The numbers of demonstrators at a rally in central Minsk swelled to tens of thousands at one point, AFP correspondents reported, with some of them trying to storm government buildings and smashing the glass doors.

Media correspondents’ reports have seen several demonstrators beaten with truncheons.

Nine candidates were running against Lukashenko. Belarus police arrested at least four of them -Sannikov, Nikolai Statkevich, Rygor Katusev and Vitaly Rymanshevsky, their party spokespeople told Reuters.

Lukashenko, 56, runs a command economy and has ruled the country of about 10 million with an iron fist since 1994, often jailing opponents and muzzling independent media while offering generous welfare and pensions to his citizens.

No one, he has said, should expect him to leave office.

“There will definitely be political changes … but no change of power in Belarus,” he told reporters in Moscow last week.

The agreement, signed in Moscow Dec. 9, signals that Minsk can continue to refine cheap Russian oil and sell it to Europe at a profit. The practice has long lubricated Belarus’ economy and allowed Lukashenko to leave much of it unreformed and offering Soviet-style state handouts.

“Russia will continue to invest in President Lukashenko because there is no danger of a color revolution with him,” Sergei Markov, a State Duma deputy with United Russia, said to The Moscow Times.

Both Russia and the International Monetary Fund have injected millions of dollars into Belarus, sending its foreign debt soaring. Minsk owed some US$25.6 billion in October, while foreign currency reserves stood at just US$2.8 billion on Dec. 1, according to the Belarussian central bank.

According to the documents published in WikiLeaks, Lukashenko is the richest man of Belarus. His personal worth is amounted to US$9 billion.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2010, released earlier this week, identified Belarus as an “authoritarian regime,” ranking it at 130, sandwiched between Gambia and Angola.

By comparison, the same report characterized Russia as a “hybrid regime” and ranked the country at 107, above Nepal but below Kyrgyzstan.

The OSCE had said on Sunday that the election already appeared “better” than in 2006.

The European Union has dangled the prospect of financial aid if Sunday’s vote is deemed fair. The EU will be watching carefully the verdict on Monday of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has fielded a small army of election monitors across the country.

The current Belarusian economic model, governed by annual and five-year plans “becomes non-competitive even in post-Soviet countries,” RIA Novosti quoted IMF representative in Belarus Natalia Kolyadina as saying.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il attended a concert yesterday celebrating the 57th anniversary of the Korean War as the two main adversaries from that conflict conducted war drills off his country’s eastern coast.

The State Merited Chorus performed numbers such as “Our General is the Best” and “My Song in the Trench,” state-run Korean Central News Agency reported today. The audience gave “enthusiastic cheers” to Kim, the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, who “heartily congratulated them on the victory” in the Fatherland Liberation War.

As Kim took part in celebrations to mark the cease-fire that ended open hostility on the Korean peninsula, U.S. and South Korean forces were putting on a display of military might that included anti-submarine maneuvers intended as a deterrent to the North.

The four-day drills, which end today, are being held after a South Korean-led investigation team in May blamed North Korea for torpedoing the South’s warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors.

The three-year Korean War ended in a cease-fire after China’s entry pushed back the U.S. and United Nations forces. South Korea remains technically at war with the North, with the two sides separated by one of the world’s most-fortified borders.

As the New York Times reports, currently, “the inmates are divided into barracks housing a hundred or so men without regard to the severity of their crimes. At night, a guard locks the door and walks away, leaving first-time offenders and people convicted of nonviolent crimes to fend for themselves in a crowd of gang members, hit men and other career criminals.”

The new plan calls for a three-stage dismantling of the barracks housing system and the abolition of all 755 penal colonies – the remains of Stalin’s gulag – by 2020.

After a lengthy, interesting, and highly competitive presidential election in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich was finally sworn into office in the country’s capital of Kiev yesterday.

During the presidential runoff over the last few months, the defining contrast between Yanukovich and his chief opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, seemed to be the former’s pro-Russian affinity versus the latter’s pro-European inclinations.

In his inaugural speech, however, President Yanukovich said that it was important for his country to build relations with Russia, the European Union, and the United States.

“Being a bridge between East and West, an integral part of Europe and the former Soviet Union at the same time, Ukraine will choose a foreign policy that will allow our country to get the most out of the development of equal and mutually beneficial relations with Russia, the European Union, the United States, and other countries that influence development in the world,” he said.

In addition to dealing with finicky relationship between its neighbors on either side, Yanukovich will also have his hands full repairing the debt-ridden and unreliable Ukrainian economy, fighting rampant corruption and poverty, as well as stabilizing a shaky political system that hasn’t been able to achieve much in recent years due to fighting within the Orange Revolution parties.

Check out this CNN interview with Mr. Yanukovich.

The Associated Press
Friday, February 19, 2010; 6:46 AM

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Turkmenistan is set to allow the creation of a second political party this year, breaking up the one-party system that has been in place since the Central Asian nation gained independence, state media reported Friday.

The only political force registered in the ex-Soviet nation is the pro-government Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, which is closely modeled on the Communist Party.

“If anyone wishes to propose creating a new political party, we can register one this year, as stipulated by the Constitution,” President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov said at a government meeting Thursday. The constitution that was adopted in 1992 allows for the formation of political parties.

It was not immediately clear to what extent the new party could diverge from the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan. It’s a common practice in former Soviet Central Asia to create nominal opposition parties loyal to the government.

Most active government opponents have fled the energy-rich Central Asian nation, where dissent is not tolerated.

Berdymukhamedov came to power in December 2006 after the death of Saparmurat Niyazov, who kept Turkmenistan largely isolated in two decades of authoritarian rule and an all-encompassing personality cult.

Berdymukhamedov has made vague commitments to implement democratic reforms, kindling hopes the Central Asian country would introduce greater freedoms.

But critics say Berdymukhamedov has failed to live up to his pledges.

In the 2008 parliamentary elections, almost all elected deputies were from the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan. A small number of independent candidates drawn from state-approved civic groups were also allowed to run. Everybody competed on a platform of support for Berdymukhamedov.

Under reforms enacted earlier in 2008, the number of seats in Parliament was more than doubled to 125, and the chamber’s powers were nominally boosted.

Another seminal development was the abolition of the rubber-stamp People’s Council – a 2,507-member assembly of presidential appointees, town elders and others that was formerly Turkmenistan’s highest legislative body.

McDonald’s opened its first outlet in Russia 20 years ago this past Sunday, on January 31, 1990, while thousands of Moscoviets braved the cold in Pushkin Square.

To celebrate the milestone, as well as a 23 percent year on year profit increase last quarter, McDonalds’ CEO Jim Skinner announced that they would be expanding their business in Russia by 45 outlets in 2010.

“Russia is doing so well, we have chosen Russia as one of the top countries for reinvestment of capital in 2010,” Mr. Skinner said.

The expansion would bring the total number of McDonald’s restaurants in Russia to 290 as Burger King, their chief rival, arrives on the scene.

“Every new competitor and opportunity to serve the Russian customers is a challenge for us to do a better job, to be more relevant,” Mr. Skinner told reporters regarding the entry of Burger King into the Russian market.

McDonald’s remains the world’s number one fast-food restaurant with more than 32,000 restaurants in 120 countries.

The aforementioned McDonald’s in Pushkin Square reviewed 27,000 applications for 600 jobs before it opened in 1990.

Today, it is the busiest McDonald’s restaurant in the world.