Don't blame the sunbathers in Turkmenistan if their bikinis seem out of style at the country's forlorn Caspian Sea beach resorts this summer.

The Turkmen government has banned the import of new bikinis and other traditional swimwear, forcing swimmers and other beachgoers to use their old suits or come up with their own fashions.

Owners of swimwear shops say customs officials have also in recent months halted the import of any swimsuits, as well as short pants for both men and women.

"As the swimming season approaches, demand for these products is growing," one seller told RFE/RL. "But the customs officers do not explain the reason for this ban."

At a new bazaar in Ashgabat -- the glittering, white-marbled capital of Turkmenistan -- shopkeepers that still have swimwear and shorts for sale say they are only able to offer what's left from their old inventory.

Once those are gone, it's unclear what people without a bathing suit will wear in the arid Central Asia nation -- and for those who like wearing shorts in a country where summer temperatures can reach 50 degrees Celsius.

It’s also unclear whether old bikinis will also fall afoul of government fashion norms.

New bikinis and shorts are just the latest in a long line of goods that the Turkmen government has decided aren’t acceptable for its people.

Ruled tightly since 2007 by authoritarian President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, who has dubbed himself "The Protector," Turkmenistan has in recent months imposed bans on such things as black-painted cars (the president thinks white cars bring "good fortune"). Also prohibited: fingernail polish, hair dye, and gold jewelry for all state workers, The Chronicle of Turkmenistan newspaper reported last month.

Like those previous bans, no government statement has been issued about the prohibition on the import of bikinis and shorts.

One customs official told RFE/RL that the ban is connected with the "the moral norms of the Turkmen people," and alluded to officials not wanting Turkmen women to wear revealing swimsuits. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, since he was not authorized to speak to the media.



With no official word about the ban, most people are finding out about it the hard way, as happened earlier this year when Ashgabat police began impounding black vehicles parked around the capital, even pulling over the drivers of such dark cars and issuing stiff fines.



The ban on nail polish and hair dyes for government employees was only the start, as shops that sold such items reported they were no longer allowed by customs officials to import the products. The items are slowly vanishing from store shelves.



Many Turkmen find the hair-dye ban to be particularly ironic, since Berdymukhammedov himself was known to have random streaks of gray upon his head early in his rule, though in recent years he has appeared in public with a head of sheer black hair, with some referring to him as a "burning brunette."

Turkmenistan is a conservative society whose cultural and fashion norms are also influenced by Islam, the dominant religion. Still, traditional swimwear of the sort found in Western countries -- for both men and women -- isn’t an uncommon sight on the country’s Caspian Sea beaches.

Many of the clothing and fashion bans appear to have focused on women, when in 2013 female state workers and students were issued rules that instructed them to wear scarlet-red dresses and state-approved national scarves.



Natural-gas rich Turkmenistan and its sparse population of some 5 million people should be relatively well off. But the government's management of the economy has led to problems such as high unemployment, rampant inflation, and severe shortages of staples, including bread. That’s forced Turkmen to smuggle flour in from bordering countries.



With an average monthly salary of about 1,200 manats (about $300), some people have been forced to seek work in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and other Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.



A group of Turkmen staged an impromptu protest on April 3 after they were prevented, without explanation, from boarding a plane to Istanbul amid a government campaign to keep people from leaving the country:





Written by Pete Baumgartner based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service</s>Baku. 8 July. REPORT.AZ/ President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov dismissed Chary Ataev from the post of the Minister of Construction and Architecture of Turkmenistan "for serious shortcomings in his work who discredited himself as a leader," Report informs citing the RIA Novosti.

This decision was announced by the head of state at an enlarged meeting of the government devoted to the results of the first half of 2017.

During the meeting, Director of the National Service for Combating Economic Crimes Mammetkhan Chakyev, spoke about the disclosure of corruption and corruption in the system of the Ministry of Construction and Architecture.

According to Chakyev, people close to the minister involved in these crimes and he promoted them to various positions and who received bribes from private enterprises that conduct construction work commissioned by the ministry.

Berdymukhamedov, signing the decree on the dismissal of the minister, stressed that "there will never be a place for bribery in Turkmenistan."</s>In what's become an almost daily scene at the super-modern, sumptuous Ashgabat International Airport, dozens of ticketed passengers with visas in hand are being told without explanation that they cannot board their planes, often bound for Istanbul or Dubai.

Some of them who anticipated the rejection collect partial reimbursement for their ticket and leave the airport disappointed. But others are enraged and argue vociferously with airport personnel (as in the video below, in Russian and Turkmen):

With estimated unemployment of around 50 percent, skyrocketing inflation, and shortages of consumer items including staples like bread, flour, eggs, and other dairy products, some people are leaving the country in search of better lives.

"I was recently fired...and despite the fact that I have a higher education, was unable to find another job,” one Turkmen émigré told RFE/RL from Turkey. “Prices are going up, life was getting more difficult [in Turkmenistan]. I had to leave the country.”

Most of those being prevented from boarding their planes are from Turkmenistan’s desolate outer regions, such as Dashoguz and Lebap, where economic conditions are most severe.

The national Migration Service office at the airport has a near-permanent crowd hovering outside its doors wanting to know why they were blocked from leaving the country.

"Those citizens who wanted to fly to Dubai and Turkey but were not allowed to board the plane are usually on a Migration Service ‘black list,’” a Turkmen émigré who requested anonymity out of fear that his relatives would be harassed, told RFE/RL. “When someone repeatedly tries to go to another country, they are summoned [by Turkmen security officials] for a meeting and reminded that they have already been denied permission to leave [Turkmenistan].”

Analysts note that the Turkmen government’s seemingly arbitrary refusals to allow citizens to leave the country violate an international convention on freedom of movement that was ratified by Turkmenistan in 1997. In addition, Turkmen law also guarantees its citizens free exit and return to the country.

Although Turkey has been a frequent destination for Turkmen migrants, obstacles to getting there in recent months have led many people to opt for Azerbaijan instead. Still others are going to neighboring Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan in search of work but also as a way of getting around the flight ban that many Turkmen nationals face in traveling to Turkey.

"When we wanted to go to Istanbul, we were prevented from boarding our flights several times at the Ashgabat airport,” a Turkmen now living in Istanbul told RFE/RL. “After our attempts to leave [Turkmenistan] did not succeed, and since we did not have the money demanded [by officials] as a bribe, we had to look for other ways. In the end, some of us crossed the border to Uzbekistan, and some to Kazakhstan, and from there flew to Istanbul.”

The man added that there are people at the border who, for $300, promise to arrange transport to Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.

“We are not going to go back to Turkmenistan now because there are no conditions for a normal life there," he added.

Meanwhile, with the government actively blocking Turkmen from leaving the country, it is also putting considerable effort into getting émigrés to return to Turkmenistan.

Turkmen security agencies have been pressuring the families of migrants to urge their loved ones to return.

“Recently, I was called to the local police department, and they demanded that my younger brother return [to Turkmenistan],” a resident of the southeastern Mary Province told RFE/RL. “They said that he needed to ‘fulfill his duty to the motherland’ and warned me that if he did not return and did not serve in the military, he would be considered a deserter and face criminal charges.”

Other measures have been financial, with Turkmenistan’s Vnesheconombank introducing restrictions last year on cash withdrawals and noncash transactions in foreign currencies abroad.

Similarly, many Turkmen who have performed their military service and want to go abroad to study are being made to pledge in writing that they intend merely to study, not work.

A Turkmen studying in Kazakhstan told RFE/RL he had to sign a statement vowing that “as soon as the academic year is over...in nine months, I will be back [in Turkmenistan].”

Some former Lebap Province residents working in Turkey told RFE/RL that their relatives had been pressured by local Turkmen officials to urge them to come home.

“Even if we would return,” said one, “we have no prospects [for work in Turkmenistan].”

Written by Pete Baumgartner based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service</s>A duo of MIT biologists has revealed what happens when a traffic jam of proteins at the surface of the mitochondria prevents proper import. They describe how the mitochondria communicate with the rest of the cell to signal a problem, and how the cell responds to protect the mitochondria. This newly-discovered molecular pathway, called mitoCPR, detects import mishaps and preserves mitochondrial function in the midst of such stress.

"This is the first mechanism identified that surveils mitochondrial protein import, and helps mitochondria when they can't get the proteins they need," says Angelika Amon, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor of Cancer Research in the MIT Department of Biology, who is also a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and senior author of the study. "Responses to mitochondrial stress have been established before, but this one specifically targets the surface of the mitochondria, clearing out the misfolded proteins that are stuck in the pores."

Hilla Weidberg, a postdoc in Amon's lab, is the lead author of the study, which appears in Science on April 13.

Mitochondria likely began as independent entities long ago, before being engulfed by host cells. They eventually gave up control and moved most of their important genes to a different organelle, the nucleus, where the rest of the cell's genetic blueprint is stored. The protein products from these genes are ultimately made in the cytoplasm outside the nucleus, and then guided to the mitochondria. These "precursor" proteins contain a special molecular zip code that guides them through the channels at the surface of the mitochondria to their respective homes.

The proteins must be unfolded and delicately threaded through the narrow channels in order to enter the mitochondria. This creates a precarious situation; if the demand is too high, or the proteins are folded when they shouldn't be, a bottleneck forms that none shall pass. This can simply occur when the mitochondria expand to make more of themselves, or in diseases like deafness-dystonia syndrome and Huntington's.

"The machinery that we've identified seems to evict proteins that are sitting on the surface of the mitochondria and sends them for degradation," Amon says. "Another possibility is that this mitoCPR pathway might actually unfold these proteins, and in doing so give them a second chance to be pushed through the membrane."

Two other pathways were recently identified in yeast that also respond to accumulated mitochondrial proteins. However, both simply clear protein refuse from the cytoplasm around the mitochondria, rather than removing the proteins collecting on the mitochondria themselves.

"We knew about various responses to mitochondrial stress, but no one had described a response to protein import defects that specifically protected the mitochondria, and that's exactly what mitoCPR does," Weidberg says. "We wanted to know how the cell reacts to these problems, so we set out to overload the import machinery, causing many proteins to rush into the mitochondrion at the same time and clog the pores, triggering a cellular response."

"What makes our cells absolutely dependent on mitochondria is one of those million-dollar questions in cell biology," says Vlad Denic, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. "This study reveals an interesting flip-side to that question: When you make mitochondrial life artificially tough, are they programmed to say 'help us' so the host cell comes to their rescue? The possible ramifications of such work in terms of human development and disease could be very impressive."

Roughly two decades ago, researchers began to notice that the genes required to defend cells against drugs and other foreign substances—together, called the multidrug resistance (MDR) response—were also expressed in yeast mitochondrial mutants for some unknown reason. This suggested that the protein in charge of binding to the DNA and initiating the MDR response must have a dual purpose, sometimes triggering a second, separate pathway as well. But precisely how this second pathway related to mitochondria remained a mystery.

"Twenty years ago, scientists recognized mitoCPR as some kind of mechanism against mitochondrial dysfunction," Weidberg says. "Today we've finally characterized it, given it a name, and identified its precise function: to help mitochondrial protein import."

As the import process slows, Amon and Weidberg determined that the protein that initiates mitoCPR—the transcription factor Pdr3—binds to DNA within the nucleus, inducing the expression of a gene known as CIS1. The resultant Cis1 protein binds to the channel at the surface of the mitochondrion, and recruits yet another protein, the AAA+ adenosine triphosphatase Msp1, to help clear unimported proteins from the mitochondrial surface and mediate their degradation. Although the MDR response pathway differs from that of mitoCPR, both rely on Pdr3 activation. In fact, mitoCPR requires it.

"Whether the two pathways interact with one another is a very interesting question," Amon says. "The mitochondria make a lot of biosynthetic molecules, and blocking that function by messing with protein import could lead to the accumulation of intermediate metabolites. These can be toxic to the cell, so you could imagine that activating the MDR response might pump out harmful intermediates."

The question of what activates Pdr3 to initiate mitoCPR is still unclear, but Weidberg has some ideas related to signals stemming from the build-up of toxic metabolite intermediates. It's also yet to be determined whether an analogous pathway exists in more complex organisms, although there is some evidence that the mitochondria do communicate with the nucleus in other eukaryotes besides yeast.

"This was just such a classic study," Amon says. "There were no sophisticated high-throughput methodologies, just traditional, simple molecular biology and cell biology assays with a few microscopes. It's almost like something you'd see out of the 1980s. But that just goes to show—to this day—that's how many discoveries are made."

More information: Hilla Weidberg et al. MitoCPR—A surveillance pathway that protects mitochondria in response to protein import stress, Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aan4146</s>BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - Switzerland's producer and import prices increased in March, the Federal Statistical Office reported Monday. 



Producer and import prices rose 2 percent year-on-year in March. 



However, on a monthly basis, producer and import prices fell 0.2 percent due to lower prices for mineral oil products and pharmaceutical specialties. 



Data showed that producer prices remained flat on month and increased 1.1 percent year-on-year. At the same time, import prices dropped 0.7 percent from February but it increased 3.8 percent from last year.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX</s>The opening of a new international sea port in the Caspian coast of Turkmenbashi is scheduled for May 2, 2018, the Turkmen government said in a message.

This issue was discussed at the Turkmen government’s meeting. The composition of the organizational commission has been approved and the program of the event has been prepared.

Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said at the government’s meeting that the country, which is located at an important crossroads of regional and continental transport routes, strives to realize the potential for the common good in this sphere, to make a significant contribution to the formation of a modern multimodal transit-transport and logistics infrastructure and to the revival of the Great Silk Road in a new quality.
Turkmenistan bans the import of bikinis, shorts, and swimsuits.