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The shack's uneven and lumpy floor is made of hard-packed dirt. There is no indoor plumbing, and the nine residents shared a hole in the ground for their toilet.

"If it rains for like two or three days in a row, the water gets into my house," Keng, 39, says through an interpreter. "When it's flooded, the water level is high, above my ankle." Keng says her family had been living there for five years, and they were desperate to move to a better home.

But if they had walked into a regular bank in Cambodia, or just about any country in the world, and asked for a mortgage to buy a nicer house, executives mostly likely would have turned them away.

Keng and her husband both work. She makes and then sells rice soup at a street stall, while her husband sells clothes at another stall. But they don't meet one of the crucial requirements for getting a mortgage: They don't receive salary slips or other financial documents, so they don't have what bankers call "verifiable income."

Late last year, Keng heard about an unusual bank called First Finance, which was designed specifically to give mortgages to low-income people like her. She and her family could already imagine the new home they wanted to buy: a two-story house with indoor plumbing. It would cost about $20,000.

"I have always wanted to live in a nice, beautiful house, but with my business, with my small, very small business like this, I never expected I can afford to buy a house," Keng says.

A New Kind Of Bank For A Changing Country

The First Finance mortgage program in Cambodia was the brainchild of Talmage Payne, a 45-year-old American. His parents worked as eye doctors in Nigeria, so he grew up wanting to help low-income people in poor countries. When Payne graduated from college in the early 1990s, he moved to Cambodia to work with the refugees of the fighting between the government and Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

You'd be forgiven for thinking chicken Kiev got its start in the Ukrainian capital. After all, a hearty dish of chicken filled with butter, wrapped in bread crumbs, and deep fried is the perfect meal to withstand subzero temperatures and cold winds blowing across the Dniepr River.

Ukrainian chefs say they have the only authentic recipe for the dish, but they concede that chicken Kiev, despite its name, has a far more sophisticated provenance: It's French.

The French connection isn't as odd as it first appears. Viacheslav Gribov, head chef at Kiev's Hotel Dnipro, says that during the late 1840s, Russian royalty sent chefs to Paris to learn from the best. And they returned with a recipe for a dish they called Mikhailovska cutlet.

"The dish was made in Paris with veal," Gribov says, "but in Moscow, it was made with chicken. At that time, chicken was more expensive and considered more of a delicacy."

Chicken Kiev was served in posh dining rooms and later appeared on the menus of official dinners in the Soviet Union, but it needed American immigrants to make it popular.

In the years after World War II, chefs at white tablecloth restaurants, like the Russian Tea Room in New York, began putting the dish — renamed chicken Kiev — on menus to lure Russian and Ukrainian immigrants who had settled in that city in large numbers.

Back in Kiev, though, chicken Kiev wasn't common until visiting tourists began requesting it in the city's restaurants in the 1960s. "Chicken Kiev made Kiev famous," says Gribov.

Ukrainian chefs like Gribov have strict rules for the dish, and they decry variations. They say neither the Russian version stuffed with cheese, nor the American and British recipe calling for garlic and parsley, is the real deal. "This began as a dish for dignitaries meeting one another. You would never serve them garlic," he says.

Gribov should know. He's been serving the dish since 1978 to some of the world's biggest political heavyweights, including Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev and President Clinton.

But the authentic Kiev recipe, Gribov says, calls for only butter inside, and if done properly, a bit of butter remains unmelted when served. "We don't just learn how to make the dish; we also learn a special way of serving and cutting it to avoid butter splashing out," he says.

The Ukrainian version comes with a small bone sticking out that keeps the butter sealed inside. It resembles a conical corn dog and delivers the same satisfying fried, crunchy outside and soft center.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Kiev tourists made the dish popular, and locals quickly followed. But, like so many foods, chicken Kiev has fallen out of fashion. It's now a convenience item, relegated to some supermarkets and fast-food restaurants in the city, and has all but disappeared from Ukrainian menus.

"I'm worried that very few chefs know how to make it," says Gribov. "Young chefs are not being trained how to make chicken Kiev. I'm thrilled every time someone orders it."

These days, he says, Kiev's urban dwellers want exotic, international cuisine. "People order lasagna, pizza. They want Mediterranean or Asian food. Many people have never left the country and want to experience something foreign through food."

Ironically, one of those foreign places is seeing a revival of the dish. In London, there's a yearning for the comfort foods of yesteryear, and chicken Kiev is back on West End menus, with new ingredients, such as truffles and a mozzarella filling.

Gribov may prefer authentic chicken Kiev, but adding a fresh twist or two may be the key to keeping the dish alive.

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first U.N. treaty to regulate the estimated $60 billion global arms trade on Tuesday.

The goal of the Arms Trade Treaty, which the U.N. has sought for over a decade, according to The Associated Press, is to keep illicit weapons out of the hands of terrorists, insurgent fighters and organized crime.

The vote on the treaty was 154-3, with 23 abstentions.

Iran, Syria and North Korea voted against the treaty, the same three nations that blocked the treaty's adoption at a negotiating conference last Thursday.

The 23 countries that abstained included a handful of Latin American nations, as well as Russia, one of the largest arms exporters. Russian envoy to the United Nations Vitaly I. Churkin said his country had misgivings about what he called ambiguities in the treaty, reports the Times, including how terms like genocide would be defined.

The New York Times had more detail on the treaty:

"The treaty would require states exporting conventional weapons to develop criteria that would link exports to avoiding human-rights abuses, terrorism and organized crime. It would also ban shipments if they were deemed harmful to women and children. Countries that join the treaty would have to report publicly on sales every year, exposing the process to levels of transparency that rights groups hope will strictly limit illicit weapons deals."

There were 385,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, up by 28,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

The news follows Wednesday's report of slower-than-expected job growth in the private sector: The ADP National Employment Report estimated there were just 158,000 jobs added at businesses last month.

And the word that jobless claims have touched a four-month high comes just before Friday's anxiously anticipated report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It will release data on the March unemployment rate and job growth in both the public and private sectors.

According to Reuters, economists expect to hear that there were a relatively modest 200,000 jobs added to those payrolls last month and that the jobless rate remained at 7.7 percent.

All in all, Reuters adds, the latest jobs data suggest "the labor market recovery lost some steam in March."