Kazakh police detained poet Ramil Niyazov as he held a one-man anti-government protest on Thursday in Almaty, holding a banner that read “Publicity discloses the insignificance of authoritarianism. Nazarbayev, 1987.”

An ageing central Asian leader grooms his daughter to succeed him, and she then overcomes suspicion from her patriarchal society to unite her people.

A federal judge in New York ordered former BTA Bank JSC chairman Mukhtar Ablyazov to pay the Kazakh lender’s legal fees for the discovery process after he failed to hand over evidence in a lawsuit accusing him of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. real estate.

Fear is subsiding and the jokers are out in force
Just one of the many jokes at new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's expense. Widely shared.

On one level, the victory of the opposition candidate in a mayoral election in Istanbul won’t change
that much. 

While Kazakhstan's president has talked up the need for national dialogue as a way of tamping down political tensions, individual activists say they have faced harassment and restrictions on their right to move freely.