Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said he expects "serious" output from the nation's largest oil deposit this year after waiting almost half his 23 years in office for the $48 billion project to start. The Kashagan field was halted in October, a month after production started, because of defects found in pipes carrying lethal sulfur-laden natural gas from the oil field. The operating company, a venture that includes Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), is completing tests at the site and hasn't said when output will resume.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said he may extend the longest reign of any former Soviet leader by running for a fifth term in 2016. "There definitely will be a transition of power -- there's nothing frozen, it will be changed," Nazarbayev, 73, said in an interview in the presidential palace in the Kazakh capital, Astana last week. "I was elected until December 2016. The time will come when we'll talk about it."

The retrial in Kazakhstan of a man convicted of the 2006 murder of a leading opposition leader was supposed to fill in blanks left by the initial proceedings. Instead, it reopened old wounds for the victim's family and raised fresh questions about the fairness of Kazakhstan's justice system. In the dock was Yerzhan Utembayev, a former head of the Senate secretariat who was serving a 20-year sentence on charges of contracting the killing of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbayev. Utembayev at one point confessed his involvement before recanting at the original murder trial in 2006.

Belarus becomes Beijing's main bridgehead in Europe. The influential magazine Business New Europe writes about it. "Russia spent the end of last year battling the EU for control over Ukraine. But should the Kremlin have been paying more attention to what was going on its southern border instead? In the last three months, the Chinese have swept through Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia, buying up Russia's backyard in a string of billion-dollar deals," the magazine writes.

The father of a student from Kazakhstan who is accused of obstructing justice in the United States over the Boston bombings has been stripped of his seat on a city council in the Central Asian nation. Amir Ismagulov, a prominent businessman and lawmaker from the oil town of Atyrau in western Kazakhstan, has been waging a one-man campaign for the release of his son, Azamat Tazhayakov, who he insists is innocent

Having been besieged by the Ottomans, and ruled over the centuries by foreign invaders from the Greeks to the Romans to Napoleon, the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta has seen plenty of unwelcome interlopers.