Politics: 19 August 2005, Friday.
Bulgarian police busted a major shipment of a substance used to make synthetic drugs. They believe that the produce would have been shipped to the Middle East.
The seized amphetamine base is enough to make 300,000 amphetamine pills, worth six million dollars, the police said.
Arrested S.T., 32, is suspected of running a drug lab near Sofia. His house in the village of Malo Buchino was raided by policemen to discover various substances used in narcotics making.
According to media reports, the suspect was an ally of late underworld leader Bozhidar Dobrev.
Officials believe that the latter was a key figure in drug trafficking from Bulgaria to the Middle East.
Source: novinite.com
Related Travel Information
The number of tourists that visit Bulgaria is three times more than in Romania, a newspaper said Monday.
Romania's Tourism Ministry expects 140,000 international holidaymakers at the country's seaside this summer. That would be 40% more than last year's figure.
Yet foreign tourists would rather spend their vacation in Bulgaria, the Romanian Capital edition said. The newspaper cited data of a local tourism agency.
Both Bulgaria and Romania are struggling to attract more tourists in an attempt to boost their economies.
More: novinite.com
70 per cent of Afghan narcotics travel through Pakistan
The Director General, Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), Pakistan, Major General Nadeem Ahmad, has said that nearly 70 percent of narcotics manufactured in Afghanistan are either smuggled into or transited through Pakistan.
Speaking at the international expert roundtable conference organised by the ANF under the Paris Pact Initiative, the director general revealed that currently an area of over 131,000 hectares was under poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
The total yield was estimated at 4,200 tonnes, which could produce 360 metric tonnes of heroine, The Daily Times quoted him as saying.
The DG ANF said that
Pakistan, India on US drug list
India and Pakistan figure in the list of 20 countries which the United States has designated as major drug- transit or illicit drug-producing countries.
Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Christy McCampbell, while briefing the press yesterday after the White House, released the findings of the annual US government report on the global drug trade, said, to be designated on the majors list does not necessarily mean that the country is supporting drug-trafficking or lacking in counter- narcotics efforts.
The designation is simple, which comes from a combination of geographical, commercial
Major piece of the Middle East
With Saddam Hussein on trial, Bin Laden still at large and more than 2,000 U.S. troops dead in Iraq, the time is ripe for a new Middle East studies program to begin.
Courses in Middle East Studies, part of a newly-proposed major, will be offered in Spring 2006. The new major will explore the culture, politics and language of the region, where students can take on hot-button issues in a historical context.
Assistant Professor Dr. Manoutchehr Eskandari said the Middle East Studies program was developed because "we are so engaged with the Middle East that
Middle East on the road to change
Sometimes it is hard not to be depressed by what happens in the Middle East.
Oppression and violence and the doings of despotic regimes can seem to drown everything else out.
Of course all of that went on happening in the Middle East during the last year, and the old stories aren't about to go away in 2006.
But something else is happening that cannot be ignored; there are signs of change.
They go back, in one way or another, to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It was a turning point for the Middle
