KAZAKHSTAN'S capital, Astana, celebrated its 15th anniversary on July 6th with a petrodollar-fuelled party. It happened also to be the 73rd birthday of the country's strongman president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who commissioned this epitome of surreal bombast rising from the Central Asian steppe.

David Cameron is under pressure from human rights campaigners as he prepares to do business with Kazakhstan. He will become the first serving British leader to visit the oil-rich country in the next few days.

It should be both easy and timely for Cameron to publicly raise concern about human rights abuses and the imprisoned opposition leader at the highest levels

With every passing month, Tony Blair looks more and more like a deposed emperor who has systematically set up his own government in exile. How else should we view the inexorable rise of his shadowy and quasi-political network of businesses, whose tentacles stretch from his smart offices next to the American Embassy in London into every corner of the globe?

Hooded and handcuffed, sixty year old poet Aron Atabek shuffles around a dimly-lit room. The guards accompanying him prevent any communication with his fellow prisoners; the hood that they've forced him to wear ensures that he can't even see them. This is the prize-winning poet's brief, daily exercise regime.

State seeks bailed-out bank sales; mooted deals get mixed reception. Four years after being nationalized and restructured by the Kazakh government, a trio of troubled Kazakh lenders are eyeing a return to private-sector control.