Recycling trashcans are everywhere you look at the Future Energy EXPO in Kazakhstan’s capital. For a region in which sprawling, smoldering, methane-emitting landfill sites are the norm, the message is a clear one: the future is green.

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, whose father is president of Equatorial Guinea, went on trial Monday in France for embezzling more than US$ 112 million of state money to fund a lavish lifestyle in Paris.

After a quarter century of independence, the fragmentation of Central Asia is evident to all. A senior official there might justifiably complain about how each country “[is] pursuing its own limited objectives and dissipating its meager resources in the overlapping or even conflicting endeavors of sister states.”

The Central Asian country built a futuristic city to host the World's Fair and polish its own brand. One small problem: it forgot to invite guests.

Kazakhstan’s EXPO 2017, an international exposition featuring the theme of “future energy,” opened with much fanfare on June 9 in Astana, the country’s capital.

Political opposition never got much of a look in in authoritarian Kazakhstan, where the same man has been in power for over a quarter of a century, but a draft law being considered by the country's rubber stamp parliament is set to make matters even more predictable.