MANILA, PHILIPPINES (11 December 2003) - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) today approved a US$5 million emergency loan for the Kyrgyz Republic to rehabilitate public infrastructure badly damaged by floods and landslides earlier this year.

The project will repair roads, bridges, and power lines - and rebuild four schools in locations less prone to natural disasters - to restore economic and social activity as soon as possible in the provinces of Chui, Issyk-Kul, Jalal-Abad, and Osh. It will also

At least 60 people are thought to have the disease in 16 villages near this impoverished republic's mountainous border with Tajikistan, Sabirzhan Adbikarimov, head of the ex-Soviet republic's sanitation and epidemiology department, said.

"A special team of epidemiologists, doctors and regional officials has been set up to liquidate the outbreak,"

The Ferghana Valley is known as one of the main centers of Islamic activity in the region. The radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and other extremist groups were founded in the valley, which straddles the territory of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Prague, 17 October 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Nineteen-year-old Kayumars Ato Ato has spent most of his life in Pongoz, a Tajik village in the densely populated Ferghana Valley. Like young people everywhere,

The gradual drying up of the Aral Sea has left a toxic wasteland threatening some three million local residents and "will cause climate change over a vast territory", Rakhmonov said.

Clouds of pesticide-laden salt continue to be blown into the surrounding region, the central Asian republics of Kazkhstan and Uzbekistan.

BISHKEK, July 18 (AFP) - The death of a Kyrgyz man in a dispute with Uzbek border guards in Central Asia's fragmented Ferghana Valley has drawn fresh attention to the antagonisms dividing several of the region's former Soviet neighbours.

Adylzhan Orkunbayev, 21, was shot dead late Wednesday after he and three other Kyrgyz residents got into an argument with Uzbek guards over the Uzbek authorities' destruction of a bridge across a nearby section of river border, a Kyrgyzstan cabinet official said.

"The Kyrgyz man was on Kyrgyz territory,

The five post-Soviet Central Asian states