A view of Kabul

Last year the streets in parts of the old city dropped by nine feet. The reason? A massive garbage haul. Just about every unemployed man in Murad Khane was recruited to clean up years of litter and mud piled on top of the streets. By the time they were done, the streets and alleys were lower.
The garbage project is part of an effort to clean up and restore old Kabul, after six years of relative peace and with millions of dollars from foreign donors, AP reported.
The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is dedicated to traditional Afghan arts and architecture, has spent $1 million on conservation and clean-up in the Murad Khane neighborhood since last year.
The Kabul organization is financed by both western and Middle East donors.
The lower street level at first left Abdul Salaam’s door looking oddly out of place, perched three feet higher than the square in front of it. So Turquoise Mountain had to fix his door, too, with fresh mud scars showing where it used to be. The frayed edges of plastic bags still stick out of the wall.
“It looks much nicer,“ Salaam said about the cleaned-up neighborhood. “And it doesn’t smell bad anymore,“ he added.
Next door to Salaam’s house, Turquoise Mountain has just completed its first full restoration, the 130-year-old Peacock House--so called because of the carved wooden peacocks at the corners of the wooden window screens.
Similar houses are tucked away in the narrow alleys of the old city in this war-torn capital.
Walk through a wooden portal and a covered walkway, and a visitor emerges in an intimate courtyard, surrounded on all sides by carved screens--as if encased in a wooden jewelry box. The screens lift in warm weather, opening the house to the courtyard.
These intricate, 19th century homes barely survived bombardment in the 1990s, when Kabul became the front line of Afghanistan’s bloody civil war, and earlier plans to raze them for apartments. But rocket shells and earthquakes have left most teetering in rickety ruin.
Now the mud and timber homes are being restored to their former splendor, instilling a newfound pride among the mostly working-class residents of the old city.
The old city is a maze of narrow alleys, houses and shrines woven deep behind Kabul’s main arteries. Some of the old homes are squalid, with mud piled high in the courtyard and chickens clucking around murky puddles left from hand washing clothes. Just next door, freshly restored wooden houses almost glow in contrast.

Perhaps too late for this year’s hot Oscar nominations, but the people of Turkmenistan are to be allowed back into cinemas for the first time in a decade, the country’s president said.
Just over a year on from the death of dictator Saparmurat Niyazov--known for the gold statues of himself he erected as part of an elaborate personality cult in the gas-rich state--circus shows, opera and even local libraries are also heading back onto the Turkmen cultural agenda, AFP reported.
“I propose to breathe life back into the lyrical arts in this country,“ said current President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. “It is regrettable to see there are no good cinemas in Ashgabat.
“Cinema houses are currently used for other purposes, and a complete renovation is required,“ he told a press conference attended by intellectuals and broadcast on state television.
“It is also time to rebuild and reopen the building that housed the Turkmenistan state circus, bringing back circus spectacles including popular national equestrian shows.“
Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi (leader of the Turkmens), installed an unprecedented level of control on the arts and media in the Central Asian republic upon coming to power in 1990, a year before the fall of the Soviet Union.
By the year 2000, he had banned opera for “non-conformity with the national mentality,“ destroying the opera house and disbanding the company with the circus, cinemas and local libraries soon going the same way.
The late leader’s book the Rukhnama (Spiritual Guide), a pink and green-bound volume of poems and thoughts on the nation, had been compulsory reading in schools, in workplaces and even as part of the driving test.
State control of the media has seen Turkmenistan ranked alongside North Korea and Eritrea as the world’s most ardent enemies of press freedom, according to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Its national television service was famous for the permanent presence of a golden image of the country’s leader in a corner of the screen, until July last year.
But Berdymukhamedov is gradually engaging Turkmenistan with the global communications revolution, having re-opened a limited number of Internet cafes in the capital after they were all shut down by Niyazov.
A requirement by which people hoping to enter university first had to do two years of menial work in their chosen field has also been abolished as the presidency concentrates on maximizing income from natural gas.

The Beauvais Cathedral

France is considering a new tax on luxury hotels to fund vital restoration work for hundreds of aging French monuments, Culture Minister Christine Albanel said.
Albanel said a two-euro (three-dollar) tax on four- and five-star hotels could be an “interesting“ way to top up the 300 million euros of state funds allocated each year to restoring France’s national heritage, reported AFP.
“Two little euros, it’s half the price of a soda, in hotels where a night costs 180 to 220 euros or more,“ she told reporters, predicting the measure could generate 50 million euros each year.
The minister justified the measure in the Le Figaro newspaper earlier by saying 70 percent of luxury-hotel guests were foreign nationals, “who are often visiting in connection with our heritage“.
A recent report on the state of France’s heritage found that 41 percent of monuments were “in bad condition“ or in “danger“--up from 32 percent in 2002-- including the Beauvais Cathedral north of Paris, which boasts the world’s tallest Gothic spire.
The cost of restoring the monuments, most of which are located in villages of less than 2,000 inhabitants, lacking either funds or resources to undertake the work, was estimated at an average of 400 million euros per year.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) released a book on the 129 languages spoken by the Chinese.
The book, “China’s Languages“, features 129 languages and gives an introduction to each in English, according to CASS, Xinhua reported.
Sun Hongkai, chief editor of the seven-chapter book, said the content was based on an investigation of Chinese languages started in the 1950s.
“During our investigation, we found some of the languages were already on the verge of extinction.“ He stressed “some were only used by senior citizens and have lost its communication
ability“.
He added “We hope the book will be useful in Protecting the culture of various ethnic groups and the harmonious existence of various cultures within the China boundary.
“Although China only has 56 official ethnic groups, some ethnic groups use two or more languages. This is the reason why we have collected so many languages.“
China is home to 56 ethnic groups. Han people, the largest group, make up about 92 percent of the country’s population.
The rest, the 55 ethnic minorities, share China’s vast land and maintain their own traditions and customs.

Bangladeshi archeologists recently excavated a 1,500-year-old brick structure of a temple in Bogra district, 170 km northwest of the capital Dhaka.
Nahid Sultana, custodian of the Department of Archeology, was quoted by local newspaper The Daily Star as saying, during the ongoing archeological excavation, walls, held together with mud, about two meters wide and antiques including part of an ornamental brick have been found. “But the entrance gate has not yet been found,“ she said.
Most of the bricks on the walls are 35cm long, 27cm wide and 4 cm thick.
To protect the walls of the main structure of the temple from collapsing, support walls were built with the same kind of bricks. A brick-built floor of a room of the temple was also discovered in the western side of the structure.
Mahabubul Alam, assistant custodian of the Department of Archaeology, said the temple was here when Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang visited the area between 639 AD and 645 AD.
He said further excavation is required to get more information about the wall but the department cannot do so due to fund constraint.

At just before 7 a.m., the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple in Singapore bustles with an unusual crowd of devotees.
Their cheeks pierced with metal spears, the skin on their backs pulled taut by dozens of hooks, the men and women gather from 1 a.m. onwards to celebrate Thaipusam, a two-day festival to honor the Hindu god Shiva’s youngest son, Lord Muruga.
Painful as it looks, the motivation for the piercing is simple, explained Melvin Ho, a first-time Thaipusam participant, reported Reuters.
“I believe in gods,“ the 49-year-old man of Chinese origin said, minutes before a friend inserted a meter-long metal skewer through his cheeks.
Some 10,000 devotees, mostly from the Tamil community that makes up four percent of Singapore’s population, annually subject themselves to being poked, pricked and pierced in various parts of their anatomies for the festival.
They believe the piercings will leave no scars and they will feel no pain, protected from bodily harm by the strict regime of abstinence, piety and vegetarianism they follow for a month before the festival, which falls in the Hindu month of Thai.
Indeed, the man who pierced Ho appeared to feel more pain than he did, grimacing as he pushed the sharpened skewer through his friend’s flesh.
With more than a dozen limes--commonly used in prayers and to ward off evil--hanging off strings tied to the metal hooks protruding from his back, Ho took his place among bare-chested men picking up wooden kavadis, or portable altars, to carry them four-and-a-half kilometers (three miles) to Sri Thendayuthapani Temple where the procession ends.
Marching alongside Ho, his friend carried a ceremonial milk pot, while an estimated crowd of 50,000 families, friends and onlookers prayed and chanted.
For national serviceman Vicky, 23, who has carried a kavadi in Thaipusam every year since he was 12, the festival is a means of giving thanks and prayers.
The procession ends with devotees making offerings and pouring pots of milk over a statue of the merciful Murugan, one of hundreds of gods who populate the colorful Hindu pantheon.
While Tamil communities across Asia carry the kavadi, the piercings are unique to Singapore and Malaysia, an official from the Hindu Endowments Boards (HEB) said.
“Piercing is very common here but not in India. It’s evolved through the years since the last century,“ she said.

Minaret of Natanz Grand Mosque in Iran's Isfahan province. (Photo by Ali Hassanpour).

Inuktitut, the language of Canada’s indigenous Inuit people, is fast falling out of use, threatening their culture, a Canadian Inuit leader warned.
“Let’s not kid ourselves, the state of our Inuit language is in critical condition, and if we lose our language, then we will have lost our culture.
“The numbers released confirm a trend that our language is eroding, slowly but surely,“ said Mary Simon, president of the Inuit group Tapariit Kanatami, AFP reported.
She was reacting to a report from Statistics Canada showing that while the language remained in active use, its degree of use was sliding in Canada.
Even as the Inuit population in Canada rose by 26 percent between 1996 and 2006 to hit 50,485, use of the indigenous language declined, the Statistics Canada report found.
In 2006 just about one in two Canadian Inuit said they spoke the language at home, down from 58 percent in the last survey, the report added.

Descendants of two pre-Russian Revolution art collectors are seeking compensation from Moscow for confiscated masterpieces going on display in a controversial London exhibition, they told AFP.
Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov had works by Matisse, Monet and Picasso confiscated under nationalization orders issued by Vladimir Lenin and went into exile in France.
“The biggest hold-up in art history,“ said Andre-Marc Deloque-Fourcaud, Shchukin’s grandson, as the Royal Academy unveiled the contents of “From Russia“, which opened Saturday after Britain passed a law protecting Russian state ownership of the pieces from inheritance claims.
The claimants say a proper judicial transfer of ownership rights is required since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, with Deloque-Fourcaud calling for financial compensation.