Recently, I was very much surprised with a news, which said that Osama bin Laden is not hiding in Tajikistan. This news was brought to me by the Google Alerts. Immediately I went to the mentioned link. It was surprising for me because I never thought that Usama can hide on the territory of Tajikistan. Then I found out that the Deputy Minister of Interior Affairs reported that information just to disapprove the report of US ‘Counterterrorist coordinator Richard Clarke’ who ‘said in early July that Usama bin Laden was hiding in Central Asia, and therefore had not been found either in Afghanistan or in neighboring Pakistan.’ I guess Mr. Clarke assumed that Osama is in Central Asia because Afghanistan is in the same region, and he does not have any other evidence. If the US intelligence agencies can not find Osama in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it does not mean that he is in Central Asia. Who knows, maybe he is hiding in the United States or Europe.

Last week Donald Rumsfeld visited Tajikistan ‘to discuss the war in neighboring Afghanistan and additional military cooperation after losing access to a base in Uzbekistan’. Jim Freeman is ‘fascinated by a quote from Donald Rumsfeld. ‘The Donald’ in his talks with the Tajik foreign minister, worried about the money generated by opium poppies coming from Afghanistan through Tajikistan on their way to other markets’. The title of the article is “Congress, America’s Tajikistan” and one can think that this article is fully about Tajikistan, but it is not. Only few words in the beginning, but anyway it is an interesting post.

Last time in my round-up I mentioned the blog of Elizabeth. She is one of the best bloggers who writes about Tajikistan. I just was enjoying her posts, particularly about Dushanbe. Recently, she wrote a marvelous article about the Tajik banknotes. It is an excellent observation of how people are having trouble with dirhams. In her last post she is comparing Central Asian countries and Afghanistan.

ch0uch0u in his livejournal which is in Russian posted a least of countries which do not have McDonalds and Tajikistan is in that list. The list is written in English. I didn’t know that there is a bunch of countries, which do not have McDonalds, I thought that only Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan don’t have it. Anyway, it think it is good for the population that we don’t have McDonalds, it is healthier that way.