Watchdog

Slovakia's state News Agency of the Slovak Republic (TASR) says it will initiate proceedings to withdraw from a controversial contract with Russia's state Sputnik news agency.

TASR said on March 30 that it will immediately stop making Sputnik's material available to its journalists.

Sputnik announced the contract on March 29 saying it was "happy to work with a major agency like TASR" and that "this deal will help us increase information exchange between our countries."

After an uproar of protest, TASR just one day later reversed course, saying that no Sputnik material had been used during the one-month trial period that led up to the contract.

Sputnik has been repeatedly accused of reporting false stories and of fomenting political extremism in the West.

In February, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu told the BBC that Sputnik's aim is "not to convince people, but to confuse them; not to provide an alternative reality, but to divide public opinions and to ultimately undermine our ability to understand what is going on."

Based on reporting by Sputnik, the BBC, and TASR

DUSHANBE -- A Tajik man who claimed that his confession of trying to recruit fighters for the Islamic State (IS) extremist group was obtained under duress, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A court in Dushanbe on March 30 found Jovidon Hakimov, 29, guilty of organizing a criminal group and recruiting Tajik citizens to the ranks of IS militants fighting in Syria and Iraq. The court sentenced him the same day.

Hakimov’s lawyer and relatives said they will appeal the ruling.

Hakimov claimed earlier that he had been severely beaten by police officers who interrogated him after his arrest in January.

Several police officers who testified at the Dushanbe court hearing refuted Hakimov's claims.

Tajik authorities say some 1,100 Tajik nationals have joined IS militants in the Middle East, with most of them recruited in Russia, where hundreds of thousands of Tajiks are migrant workers.