According to RFE / RL, comparable sums are believed to be transferred through non-bank systems, implying that cash remittances make up approximately 30 percent of Armenia's GDP in the first half of 2008.

* RFE / RL East German Subject Files: Communist Party Open Society Archives, Budapest

* RFE / RL East German Subject Files: Communist Party Open Society Archives, Budapest

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty ( RFE / RL ) is a broadcaster funded by the U. S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East " where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed ".

RFE / RL is supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a bi-partisan federal agency overseeing all US international broadcasting services.

Founded as an anti-communist propaganda source during the Cold War, RFE / RL was headquartered at Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany, from 1949 to 1995.

In addition to the headquarters, the service maintains 20 local bureaus in countries throughout their broadcast region, as well as a corporate office in Washington, D. C. RFE / RL broadcasts in 28 languages to 21 countries including Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

In 1976, the two radios merged to form Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty ( RFE / RL ) and added the three Baltic language services to their repertoire.

On February 21, 1981, RFE / RL's headquarters in Munich was struck by a massive bomb, causing $ 2 million in damage.

Funding for RFE / RL increased during the Reagan Administration.

This presented a challenge to RFE / RL's broadcast strategy, which had been very cautious since the controversy over its alleged role in the Hungarian Revolution.

RFE / RL also played a significant role in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which brought an end to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

Following the November 17 demonstrations and brutal crackdown by Czechoslovak riot police, RFE / RL's Czechoslovak service reported that a student, Martin Šmid, had been killed during the clashes.

Upon hearing about the story, RFE / RL did not run it immediately, but attempted to find a second corroborating source for the story, as per official RFE / RL policy.

While a second source was never found, RFE / RL eventually decided to run the story of Šmid's death after it was reported by several major news organizations, including Reuters, the Associated Press, and the Voice of America.

In addition, Pavel Pechacek, the director of RFE / RL's Czechoslovak service at the time, was mistakenly granted a visa to enter the country by the Czechoslovak authorities prior to the demonstrations.

On January 31, 2004, RFE / RL launched broadcasts to the former Yugoslavia in Serbo-Croatian ( Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrin ).

In the late 1990s RFE / RL launched broadcast to Kosovo in Albanian and to Macedonia in Macedonian.

In 1995, RFE / RL moved its headquarters from Munich to Prague.

RFE / RL ended broadcasts to Hungary in 1993 and stopped broadcasts to Poland in 1997.

In 2004 RFE / RL stopped broadcasting to Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Romania.

RFE / RL proceeded with reduced broadcasts to only six European countries: Moldavia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo.

1994 – 2008, RFE / RL used the former Federal Parliament building of the abolished Czechoslovakia in New Town, Prague | Prague New Town.

RFE / RL states that its mission is to serve as a surrogate free press in countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.

In many of these countries, RFE / RL and similar broadcasters provide more reliable domestic news than local sources.

* Chechnya: Khasavyurt Accords Failed To Preclude A Second War, RFE / RL, August 30, 2006

In 1971 the radio stations came under public spotlight once again when prominent U. S. Senator Clifford Case introduced Senate Bill 18, which would remove funding for RFE and RL from the CIA's budget, appropriate $ 30 million to pay for fiscal year 1972 activities, and have the Department of State temporarily oversee the radio stations.

* RFE / RL interview with Zalmay Khalilzad ( May 18, 2007 )

In January 1950 the NCFE obtained a transmitter base at Lampertheim, West Germany and on July 4 of the same year RFE completed its first broadcast aimed at Czechoslovakia.

Although its nongovernmental status spared it from full scale McCarthyist investigations, several RFE journalists including director of the Czech service, Ferdinand Peroutka were accused of being soft on Communism.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, American and Czech authorities agreed to move RFE / RL's Prague headquarters away from the city center in order to make it less vulnerable to terrorist attack.

On January 1, 2009, Azerbaijan imposed a ban on all foreign media in the country, including RFE / RL.

In 2008 Afghan president Hamid Karzai urged his government to provide assistance to a rape victim after listening to her story on Radio Azadi, RFE / RL's Afghan service.

The program, called Ekho Kavkaza ( Echo of the Caucasus ), focused on local and international news and current affairs, organized in coordination with RFE / RL's Georgian Service.

He resigned from RFE on March 1, 1954 in order to wage a successful bid for Congress.

His journalism and book writing drew heavily on long dialogues, in effect extended interviews, from his work at RFE, involving major intellectual and political figures who were prepared to engage with the Cold War.

The AEA sponsors RFE: Resources for Economists on the Internet, an online source available to the general public without subscription.

RFE is currently updated on a monthly basis.

However, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the satellite communist governments of Eastern Europe, a Hoover Institution conference reviewing reports from citizens in newly independent Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries tended to substantiate the effectiveness of RFE and U. S. Voice of America broadcasts both in providing information and bolstering democratic movements within those countries, despite attempts at electronic jamming and counter-propaganda.

Other stations targeted by the Soviet jammers ( but not to the same extent as RFE / RL / VOA / BBC ) included Deutsche Welle and occasionally Radio Vaticana, Kol Yisrael and Radio Canada International.

In a few instances, a slash and a number or additional letters were appended to these letters ( e. g. Tandy 1000 TL / 2, Tandy 1000 RL / HD ).

The Tandy 1000 RL / RLX / RSX series were slim-line desktop home computers.

The RL and RL / HD featured a 8086 processor, 512 kB of RAM ( expandable to 768 kB to provide 128 kB for video ), smaller keyboard and mouse ports ( which were similar to the PS / 2's ports but not directly compatible ), a bidirectional parallel port instead of the edge-connector ports, and the SL's enhanced graphics and sound.

The RL / HD also included a built-in XT IDE hard drive.

* Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty-RFE / RL provides coverage of current affairs in Belarus