A new house has been built in Almaty. From outside it does not look differently from other new buildings, but inside it is fully equipped for wheelchair users. Wide doorways, elevators, spacious rooms, special bathrooms - everything is made for their comfort. There are 25 flats in the house, which means that 25 invalids can normally live there, whereas there are more than 400 thousand of them around Kazakhstan

Today you could get your share of free hugs in Almaty. People with sheets of paper saying "Hug me" were going around on Arbat street, coming to passers-by and asked to hug them. And can you imagine it they got their hugs. It is this what journalist Sayat Shulembayev who tragically perished a year ago had been dreaming about...

There is an anecdote explaining that if a photoalbum is small and a picture in it is ugly it actually is a passport. Our correspondent Aleksey Romanov has changed his ID recently. After taking picture for the ID he came to the office and was raging about bad lighting that a photographer in a Centre of population service was using. With such conditions, asserts Aleksey, pictures in passports are bound to be bad. But is there anybody who is satisfied with his or her photograph? Can you guess which ones of our heroes think that they look nothing like their passport picture and who suppose that their photographs are not that bad?

Swiss photographer Didier Ruef has visited almost 80 countries looking for objects of his stories. The main topic of his works is people's life in polluted environment. Next spring he is planning to publish a book containing reports from different spots in the world where people have to cope with consequences of ecological catastrophes. Didier wants to conclude the book with pictures made two years ago in two Kazakhstani cities Semey and Aralsk...

We call them when we have problems: a fire, a blocked phone, when we are refused to be given a credit, when we are lost or when we just need to get some information. For us they are just a voice which have to help us solve a problem as soon as possible. Sometimes they seem utterly useless, but sometimes we are unbearable as well. Voxpopuli.kz decided to unveil the mystery and show who is there on the other end of the phone cable.

Meet Anara Rapayeva, she is 21 years old. Born in Ekibastuz, she has been living in Almaty for three years and studying in KazATK. This story is not about a simple girl one day becoming a princess. It is more similar to the story of Cinderella who was pursuing her goal for a very long time and overcoming obstacles and hardships to fulfill her dearest dream.

Do you already know which present your child wants for New Year? If not you can just ask him or her. But what if a child has hearing problems and cannot speak? Students of the boarding school №1 for children with hearing disorder are looking forward to the holiday too. Their wishes are not too complex and very similar to each other. Almost all the boys want to get a Lego construction toy and girls want a beautiful doll. 1st year students who had already started learning sign language tried to explain to us what they wished for New Year. Little ones were just meaningfully looking in a hope that we would understand without words...

We were preparing this report for two months carefully collecting bits and pieces of the story of one of the major events happening this year, 2nd Charity Ball in Almaty. 120 debutants appeared in front of the guests in the huge hall of Almaty Towers on the 20th of November to showcase their ability to dance an elegant waltz and merry quadrille. To master these dances young people had to practice for one and a half months... Every event takes time and efforts to organise, but how much more so if you are preparing for a real Ball?

This week Almaty has hosted a regular scientific conference where researchers have been debating how old the city actually is. And although official age is assumed to be 156 years, scientists claim that Almaty might be thousand years old. For most of us Alma-Ata has been familiar only for several decades. We decided to remind you and ourselves what the main sights, which make the city so special, used to look like.

Great Moscow Circus for the first time brought its new show to Almaty. The star turn is a unique show by People's Artists of Russia Lyudmila and Tofik Akhundov "Dancing hippopotamuses". There are four heavyweight artists performing on the stage simultaneously, named Yana, Aida, Zulya and Zlata. Actually, the latter has recently been discovered to be a male hippopotamus Zlat...