Banned Kazakh Opposition Press Vows to Continue Online

Kazakhstan, an oil-rich ex-Soviet nation in Central Asia best known for voluntarily forsaking the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, is carrying out an unprecedented media crackdown that will leave it virtually without any opposition newspapers for the first time in its 21-year history as an independent nation.

Billions in Subsidies Prop up Unsustainable Overfishing

Calls are mounting for the world's big fishing powers to stop subsidising international fleets that use destructive methods like bottom trawling in foreign coastal waters, drastically reducing the catch of local artisanal fishers who use nets and fishing lines.

Tough Job? Try Reporting on Corruption in Kazakhstan

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, a 36-year-old reporter for an independent weekly in western Kazakhstan who was recently ambushed and nearly killed, was awarded the Peter Mackler Award for Ethical and Courageous Journalism this month – the first journalist from that country to receive international recognition in 10 years.

Blue Crab Revival Offers Hope for Ailing Fisheries

Authorities in Maryland and Virginia have rescued the Chesapeake Bay's blue crab from the brink of collapse, tripling its population in five years, by using methods that emerging crabmeat-exporting countries in Asia and Central America could emulate, scientists say.

Kazakhstan Divided Over Fugitive Banker

As the trial began this week of 37 alleged participants in a strike-related riot, the man who did the most to help the striking oil workers and to publicise their cause, Mukhtar Ablyazov, remained far beyond the Kazakhstan government’s grasp.

Kazakh Media Faces Harsh Crackdown

President Nursultan Nazarbayev is orchestrating a media crackdown that editors and independent analysts say is the harshest since he began ruling this Central Asian republic in 1989.

KAZAKHSTAN: Dissent Stifled Amid Indifference

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, re-elected last April with an improbable yet typical 93 percent, presided last weekend over parliamentary elections that maintained his iron grip on his oil-rich country’s parliament, and further stifled dissent.

KAZAKHSTAN: Riot Town Has Its Say

Kazakhstan this week canceled, then re-authorised elections in a remote oil town where recent riots stemming from an oil workers strike left at least 16 dead and more than 40 buildings burned.

KAZAKHSTAN: Give Them Bread, But Not So Much

Kazakhstan, intent on diversifying its economy away from oil and mining, has extended its cereal acreage by a third in the past ten years, doubled the value of its grain harvest. It has eradicated rural poverty in the north, the country's breadbasket.

CLIMATE CHANGE: ‘High Glaciers Safe From Warming’

Global warming will melt far less of the glaciers of Central Asia than of those in other mountain ranges, shielding the people who depend on them for water from the effects of climate change for several decades at least, scientists say.

CENTRAL ASIA: Together They Lose

Rarely have so many donor countries spent so much for so long to achieve so little. In fact, the scores of Western countries ranging from the Netherlands to the United States that have tried for 20 years to coax the Central Asian nations to use their water cooperatively and create a win-win situation for all have found that the Central Asians are cooperating less and less, not more and more.

KAZAKHSTAN: Sea Reclaimed as Lake

Just six years after the completion of a dike that raised the level of the northern part of the Aral Sea by two metres and slashed its salt content by two-thirds, this remote Central Asian lake once synonymous with ecological catastrophe has become a model of environmental recovery.

Key Fisheries Treaty to Lapse in Rebuke to U.S.

For the past quarter century, the United States' relations with Pacific island nations were framed by the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which combines foreign aid, subsidies to the U.S. fleet of purse-seine fishing vessels and their largely unfettered access to the islands' waters, which contain the world's last major stocks of tuna.

Big Fleets Resist Pacific Islands’ Plan to Save Fisheries

Eight Pacific island nations that are leveraging their contracts with foreign fishing fleets to save the world's last great stocks of tuna are getting little sympathy from the countries representing those fleets.