Owen Jones
As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn't allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder. In the latest CIA coup, America's leading spooks have sent the Twittersphere into a frenzy with their chucklesome debut on social media: "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." How droll! More than a quarter of a million people have retweeted what has been described as "the best first tweet possible". No wonder: it's one of the world's most secretive organisations being self-deprecating, light-hearted, even – dare I say it? – cute.
There is an old adage in Kazakhstan: "Happiness is multiple pipelines." For the oil-and-gas rich Caspian country, keeping up good relations with a handful of customers -- namely, Russia, China, and the West -- at all times, without engaging too deeply with a single player, has been a guiding foreign policy principle since it gained independence in 1991.
Rakhat Aliyev, the Kazakh president's former son-in-law, has been detained in Austria while under investigation for alleged crimes including murder and running a crime network in the Central Asian country, his lawyer said.
Ken Silverstein's 'The Secret World of Oil' explores a murky business on which the west depends. Oil is the world's most important traded commodity. It powers our cars and drives our industry. And surging energy demand in developing countries from China to Brazil means its significance will only grow.
The Kazakh authorities did everything possible to prevent journalists spoiling the party when President Nursultan Nazarbayev received his Russian and Belarusian counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Aleksander Lukashenko, in Astana on 29 May for the signing of the treaty creating the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed Kazakhstan and Belarus on Thursday into a new Eurasian Economic Union built to rival the United States, EU and China - but the absence of Ukraine undermined his dream of restoring Soviet glory days.
It won't exactly mean going back to the USSR, but Vladimir Putin is laying the foundations of a huge trading bloc which opponents see as an attempt to recreate at least part of the lost Soviet empire.
