On this week's Majlis Podcast, a panel discusses on what has and has not changed since Shavkat Mirziyoev became Uzbekistan's leader.

Authorities in Turkmenistan continue to deny there are any cases of coronavirus in the country. Will a second WHO mission prove them wrong?

Ever since the coronavirus appeared in Central Asia, the authorities in countries there have used some questionable systems to count the numbers.

On this week's Majlis, a discussion not only about rights defender Azimjan Askarov, who died in a prison in Kyrgyzstan on July 25, but the fate of other political prisoners across Central Asia who have been wrongly imprisoned.

Despite hundreds of millions in international aid, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have all seen spikes in cases of the coronavirus in recent weeks.

On this week's podcast, a look at the Tajik government’s latest crackdown on the few independent media outlets left that still report honestly about affairs inside the country.

Reports of domestic violence in Central Asia were already growing before the outbreak of the coronavirus forced most of the governments there to implement lockdowns. Since then, the problem has only become worse.

At the beginning of June, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan started to ease restrictions put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It was not long before all three countries started registering record numbers of new cases.

A number of people have been charged with spying in Uzbekistan recently, but there are doubts about the validity of the treason charges against some of them.

There are reasons to believe that when the coronavirus crisis finally passes, China will not be the same partner to the Central Asian states that it has been for the last two decades -- and some of that has to do with the changing attitudes of Central Asia’s people toward its giant eastern neighbor.