Neil Bowdler is a multimedia editor at RFE/RL.
A prominent Afghan journalist and news anchor has been shot dead alongside her driver as she traveled to work in Jalalabad. Malala Maiwand, 24, worked for the private media group Enikass and was a vocal advocate of women's rights.
Viktor Kozlov used to drive a tractor on a Soviet-era state farm, but when times got tough, he moved to the coal-rich Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk and started selling coal to residents there to heat their homes.
Tina Grigalashvili is 94 years old. Every day, she gets up at 4 a.m. and goes to work, cleaning the streets. She used to teach Georgian in a school, but started sweeping the streets after retirement to keep busy and get out of the house.
An Kosovar Albanian shopkeeper has come to the rescue of a 92-year-old ethnic Serb woman who lives alone in an abandoned village in Kosovo. Fadil Rama brings food and prepares meals for Blagica Dicic, whom he has known since childhood.
Nina Bahinskaya, a septuagenarian great-grandmother, says she never misses a protest against the government following an August presidential election widely seen as rigged. She's been attending anti-government protests since the 1980s.
Valery Melnikov was known in Russia for the huge New Year's cards he created on the ice and snow of a frozen river in the country's Far East. After he died in October at the age of 72 after contracting COVID-19, residents of his home region of Amur decided to continue the tradition he started.
Jamila is 35 years old, a mother of six, and says her drug-dealing husband got her addicted to heroin. In the southern Afghan city of Kandahar where she lives, there are an estimated 300,000 drug addicts and only one treatment center that offers no places for women.
Serbia has seen a recent influx of digital nomads -- people who use the Internet and remote working to move around the world. The capital, Belgrade, was recently listed as the seventh best city in Europe for life and work by nomadlist.com.
Serbian sculptor Nikola Macura turns weapons and military equipment into musical instruments. He's used handheld mortars, Kalashnikovs, and helmets as part of a new sound installation called From Noise To Sound.
The situation in many Ukrainian hospitals is critical, doctors say, after a spike in the number of coronavirus cases in the country. There's a shortage of beds, intensive-care units are overcrowded, and many seriously ill patients have to wait for ventilators.
A Russian court has cleared the head and deputy head of a prison in the Russian city of Yaroslavl of involvement in the brutal torture of an inmate. Lower-ranking officers received sentences ranging from three to more than four years.
Russian student Aleksei Dudoladov has resorted to climbing up a tree to participate in online classes because there's no clear Internet signal in his Siberian village. He's asked the governor of the Omsk region for help, but is still waiting for a reply.
Medical workers in Ukraine are mourning lost colleagues as the country struggles to cope with a surge in COVID-19 cases. Over half a million Ukrainians have become infected since the start of the pandemic and almost 10,000 have died, according to official figures, including 140 medical workers.
Dramatic video of a Minsk taxi driver saving a fleeing anti-government protester from the clutches of Belarusian police went viral on social media in September. Now, in an interview with Current Time, the driver says he was only doing what others would have done.
Buzludzha is the biggest communist-era monument in the Balkans. Built on a mountaintop in Bulgaria in 1981, it's since fallen into ruin and its very future is at risk.
Around 700 paintings and drawings by a Jewish painter murdered during the Holocaust have been uncovered in a house in a Prague suburb that was being torn down. The works by Gertrud Kauders, who studied at Prague's Academy of Fine Arts, were found behind walls and under floorboards.
Three successful Afghan women -- a model, a musician, and a poet -- say they won't accept restrictions on their rights as part of any peace agreement negotiated with the Taliban.
Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world that allows commercial surrogacy. But when something goes wrong, human lives hang in the balance, and critics say the business should be stopped or at least regulated.
A polio campaign has begun in the Pakistani city of Karachi, with the authorities hoping to vaccinate over 200,000 children.
RFE/RL's Radio Farda spoke to members of Israel's Iranian Jewish community about their split identities and their struggles to build a new life.
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