Page 150 - Icks News Today

The Turkmen parliament's two years as a bicameral body are set to end after de facto leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov called for one house to be disbanded and another to be turned into an all-dominating council. It's a familiar pattern in the region.

We know you're busy and probably don't have the time to read all of our coverage each and every day. That's why we've put together The Week's Best. Here are some of the highlights produced by RFE/RL's vast team of correspondents, multimedia editors, and visual journalists over the past seven days.

Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has dismissed the parliament's lower chamber, the Mazhilis, and set March 19 as the date for snap parliamentary elections a year after the country was plunged into chaos amid deadly protests that revealed deep-seated anger over corruption and nepotism.

This month, a Russian court handed long prison terms to the last of 25 Crimean Tatars detained in occupied Crimea in 2019 for alleged extremism. The defendants say they are being silenced for exposing the persecution of Crimean Tatars since Russia seized the Ukrainian region in 2014.

Abandoned by friends and family as he awaited his fate on death row, a 39-year-old man executed in connection with ongoing antiestablishment protests in Iran has gained a family of supporters who see him as a face of everyday victims of state repression.

Financier and political activist Bill Browder says that jailed former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is showing "signs of torture."

As the EU is stopping imports of Russian oil, Bulgaria continues to refine it. With growing pressure on the Russian oil giant LUKoil, that won't last forever.

Russia's foreign minister says Moscow is ready to send a mission from the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization to the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, where tensions have escalated in recent months over the blockading of the only direct access road to the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Five Belarusian activists have been sentenced to 12 years in prison each in a case related to the creation of a social-media account that revealed the personal data of law enforcement officers involved in the brutal crackdown on protests over the results of the August 2020 presidential election.

An Iranian man has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison for decapitating his wife and displaying her head in public in a so-called "honor killing."