Ashgabat has long boasted about its huge natural-gas fields, and has signed multibillion-dollar contracts with foreign countries for most of those reserves. But no independent assessment has ever confirmed they actually exist.
EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs (official site) EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs says there is no reason to fear the recent spate of energy deals Russia has made with EU member states. In an exclusive interview with RFE/RL correspondent Ahto Lobjakas, Piebalgs says Brussels will continue to seek alternative suppliers to meet future EU demand, and notes that legislation is in the pipeline to prevent the Russian energy giant Gazprom from gaining control of strategic assets in Europe.
Afghan authorities say they have discovered a weapons cache containing 130 different types of mines that appear to have been imported from Iran.
An Iranian blogger known as "Godless" says he authored the article on women and the Koran that has landed an Afghan journalism student on death row. In fact, he tells Radio Farda, his pieces frequently cross the line.
Iranian-French filmmaker Mehrnoushe Solouki was thrown in prison after she filmed a mass grave outside Tehran. Now free, she's haunted by what she saw -- and heard -- inside Iran's most notorious prison.
The international spotlight is back on Iran's nuclear program ahead of six-country talks in Berlin on possible new UN economic sanctions against Tehran.
With the presidential election going to a second round in Serbia, RFE/RL's Gordana Knezevic takes a closer look at the results and what they mean in "The Briefing."
2007 was a bad year for freedom, according to a prominent rights-advocacy organization that has registered a global decline in political rights and civil liberties for the second consecutive year.
The UN nuclear agency is still waiting for Bishkek to reply to a request for more information on a recent seizure of radioactive material. Experts say it appears unlikely smuggling was involved, but the case is a wakeup call to the threat of nuclear proliferation from former Soviet areas.
Mohammad Latif has spent three years waiting to be hanged, for a crime he committed when he was 14. Many more children face imminent execution in Iran, a country that Human Rights Watch calls the world's leading executor of children and juvenile offenders.
Iran and Turkmenistan have enjoyed good ties since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Ashgabat became independent. But those relations have been tested over interruptions in the flow of Turkmen natural gas to Iran.
Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have reached an agreement to settle all outstanding matters relating to Iran's nuclear program in four weeks' time.
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