Page 3 - Chris Rickleton News Today

Kazakh officials have hinted at ending their relationship with a company that oversees a heavy polluting steelworks and a network of coal mines where scores of people have died in accidents. But they don't seem to have a replacement for an investor that entered the Kazakh market almost 30 years ago.

Two years after re-instituting the Constitutional Court, Japarov has approved a law that opens its decisions to presidential interference.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov is set to gain new powers to interfere in the rulings of the Constitutional Court in cases where national morals are at stake. But definitions are vague and critics see another blow to the rule of law.

Here are some of the highlights produced in English by RFE/RL's vast team of correspondents, multimedia editors, and visual journalists over the past seven days.

The International Assistance Mission (IAM) in Afghanistan says it is "working together with the UN and ACBAR, the coordinating body for NGOs in Afghanistan," to seek the release of 18 staff members it says were detained by the Taliban without explanation from its Ghor Province premises.

The Pentagon's Central Command has ordered interviews of roughly two dozen more service members who were at the Kabul airport when suicide bombers attacked during U.S. forces' chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, as criticism persists that the deadly assault could have been stopped.

A top U.S. diplomat to Afghanistan has categorically ruled out Washington's support for a new war in the nation, saying Afghans "deserve some peace" after more than four decades of international conflict ended two years ago when American and international troops left as the Taliban seized power.

The ruling Taliban has detained 18 staff members of the International Assistance Mission (IAM) in Afghanistan from the humanitarian group's offices in the central Ghor Province, including an American surgeon.

China has become the first country to formally name a new ambassador to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, after its envoy presented credentials at a ceremony in Kabul.

An Afghan soldier who fled the Taliban and traveled through nearly a dozen countries before being arrested at the Texas-Mexico border and detained for months has been granted asylum, allowing him to remain in the United States, his brother said on September 13.