ASTANA (Reuters) - Heads of state flying to Kazakhstan's showpiece capital for a security summit next week will be met with fanfare as Astana shrugs off critics of its year at the helm of Europe's top security and rights watchdog.

The Kazakh billionaire who bought the Duke of York's former marital home is the subject of a £380 million money laundering investigation, it was claimed last night.

In the course of the entire year of my incarceration in the colony-settlement of Ust-Kamenogorsk city (a custody place for people that have committed a reckless crime) the colony administration has been undertaking all possible measures for my illegal political isolation from the outer world. Regardless the fact that this colony-settlement is an
institution of a semi-open type, in which inmates are not under safe-keeping or under the guard but only under the overseeing and out of 130 convicts more that 100 work outside the colony I am deprived of all that, as I believe on political reasons.

China is planning to put its cheap labour force to work in a new 70,000-strong factory town across the border in Kazakhstan, in a move which will heighten fears of a land grab in the Central Asian country.

Officials in Kazakhstan are developing a grand plan to get virtually everyone in the Central Asian country speaking Kazakh by 2020. Data from a recent survey, however, suggests that Astana's goal may be overly ambitious.

The bureaucratic hoops that people sometimes have to jump through to complete routine business in Kazakhstan are legendary. Frustrated by years of dealings with what they say are high-handed officials, one group of citizens has turned in desperation to the old Soviet method of samizdat to draw attention to their plight, Respublika reports.