Kazakhstan

The country is welcoming a chance to boost its profile through the new movie featuring the fictional journalist Borat. And as one young Kazakhstani puts it, "This is a parody of American society."

The plane was a Dutch-built Fokker 100 aircraft operated by Bek Air, which bills itself as Kazakhstan's first low-cost carrier. Officials said the plane's tail hit the runway twice during takeoff.

Serikjan Bilash signed a plea deal after Kazakh officials charged him with "inciting ethnic tensions" for his work documenting repression against Kazakhs and in China's Xinjiang region.

Muslim minorities in the northwestern region are targets of a sweeping security operation. Officials say most residents have been returned to society, but relatives say many are sentenced to prison.

Nazarbayev is the only president Kazakhstan has ever known. He first rose to authority as a Communist Party official — and he's been accused of human rights abuses.

The announcement, from Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry, comes after reports of massive repression of ethnic Muslim minorities in far western China.

An ethnic Kazakh Chinese woman says Chinese authorities in Xinjiang forced her to undergo an abortion. Government minders were assigned to monitor her at home. Finally, she left China for Kazakhstan.

"They made me wear what they called 'iron clothes,'" the man tells NPR, describing a 50-pound metal suit he was forced to wear for 12 hours. When he returned home, people were afraid to speak to him.

A Kazakh rights organization has collected more than 1,000 testimonies from ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs whose families have disappeared into a network of internment camps in Xinjiang.

Ruthenium-106, an artificial isotope, was detected in early October and is now gone. European safety officials say it poses no health risk to residents and that it might have come from Russia.

The unmanned rocket stopped transmitting data about six minutes after it took off from Kazakhstan and never made it to space. This is the third botched launch of a Russian spacecraft in two years.

The country's failed bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics disappointed LGBT activists. They'd hoped global attention would lead to greater tolerance in a country where they live in a "state of fear."