Latest news with #Kazakhstan
Reuters
16 hours ago
- Business
- Reuters
Transneft says oil flows continue to slide in 2025
MOSCOW, June 27 (Reuters) - Russia's oil pipeline monopoly Transneft's (TRNF_p.MM), opens new tab oil flows have continued to decline this year amid the OPEC+ deal and technological challenges, the company's First Deputy CEO Maxim Grishanin said on Friday. In a statement on the company's website, he also said that, due to the turnover decline, revenues will not return to the levels typical of the past 10 years until around 2030. Transneft, which operates 67,000-kilometre-long (42,000-mile) oil pipeline network, handles more than 80% of all the oil produced in Russia. CEO Nikolai Tokarev said Transneft shipped 447 million metric tons (around 8.94 million barrels per day) of oil in 2024, including 435 million tons of Russian oil and 12 million tons of oil from Kazakhstan. The total flows were down from 460 million tons in 2023. Transneft's main source of revenue is tariffs on oil and oil products shipments via its vast pipeline network.
Al Jazeera
17 hours ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
‘The Caspian Sea is shrinking. It is visible with the naked eye'
Aktau, Kazakhstan – During his childhood, Adilbek Kozybakov's mother always kept a jar of sturgeon caviar in the fridge. Each day, she would spoon it on small pieces of bread and butter for him and his siblings. Caviar would keep them in good health, she believed. Kozybakov did not like it. It was salty and 'smelled like the sea', said Kozybakov, an ecologist, now 51. He grew up in Aktau, a city in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea. But now, more than 40 years later, he looks back at this family ritual with nostalgia. Today, there is no more natural caviar left in Aktau's shops. Sturgeons are an endangered species due to overfishing and the degradation of their habitat. And soon, the sea might be gone, too. According to a study published in Nature magazine in April, the Caspian Sea level is likely to decline by up to 18 metres (59 feet) and could lose up to 34 percent of its surface by the end of the century. Water decline of even five to 10 metres may disrupt key ecosystems in the area, including habitats for endemic Caspian seals and sturgeon, the study says. For residents like Kozybakov, who is a member of a civil advisory body on the environment at the Ministry of Ecology, this has been clear for years. 'We don't have to conduct any studies to know that the sea is shrinking. It is visible with the naked eye,' Kozybakov told Al Jazeera. Located between Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea is the world's largest landlocked body of water, part of the 'Middle Corridor' – the fastest route from China to Europe bypassing Russia, and a major source of oil and gas. Many fear that the Caspian Sea may share the fate of the nearby Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which began to shrink in the 1960s as the rivers supplying it were extensively used by the Soviets to irrigate cotton fields. Currently, the sea occupies only 10 percent of its original surface, and its decline has had a tremendous effect on the local ecosystem and people's health. As in the case of the Aral Sea, the Caspian's woes are not been driven only by climate change. 'Polluted by oil companies' The Volga, Europe's largest and longest river located in Russia, has been the source of 80 to 85 percent of the Caspian water. According to experts, Russia's water management has affected the sea. 'Over the years, Russia has built a lot of dams and water reservoirs on the Volga and has used its water for agriculture and industry. As a result, much less water has been flowing into the Caspian Sea,' Kozybakov told Al Jazeera. 'A hundred years ago, the sturgeon would live for many decades, and no one would touch it. It grew to huge sizes which we can see at historical photos. Today, the population of sturgeon has been destroyed by poachers and its environment polluted by oil companies.' Kazakhstan's three major oil fields, discovered in Soviet times, are operated by foreign companies. In February this year, Vadim Ni, an environmental lawyer from Kazakhstan behind a campaign to 'Save the Caspian Sea' decided to sue his own government. He argues that the state's contracts signed with the multinational oil and gas companies have been kept secret, which makes it impossible to determine their real impact on the environment around the Caspian Sea. In the 1990s, Kazakhstan was newly independent, emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When it became clear that its oil and gas reserves could be extracted and transported to other countries, large energy companies and their lawyers flocked to the country to secure deals. They negotiated their contracts with the Kazakh state to be subject to international private law, ensuring details of the deals remained confidential. As a result, in case of conflict between the signatories, international arbitration courts would need to resolve disputes. Ni said that this is unjust and against international law, as per the Aarhus Convention, which ensures open access to environmental information. 'Oil companies do not want to reduce their revenues and increase their liability and responsibility for the environment. While they often conduct environmental research to demonstrate due diligence, there is a reason to question the objectivity and reliability of these results, given their vested interests,' said Ni. 'In addition, we are discussing energy transition and German investments in hydrogen energy on the Caspian. But it will be green energy for Europe, not for us. Hydrogen requires huge amount of electricity produced by renewables and we will have to deal with the waste and water pollution,' he told Al Jazeera. The court has not admitted the case, claiming that there are no grounds to launch a lawsuit. But Ni said if his appeal fails, he will pursue the case under the international legal system. Meanwhile, the fight to save the Caspian Sea has already begun. In Aktau, Kozybakov works with the local administration, residents and civil society groups, while raising the alarm at the national level by joining environmental initiatives. 'We want to raise these issues from the bottom to show the government that people are concerned,' said Kozybakov. 'Not only ecologists but also average citizens, residents of Aktau who grew up here and who are worried about the future of their children and grandchildren.'
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Nursery teacher 'who made one child's hair fall out due to physical abuse' is caught on CCTV hitting and slapping two-year-olds, prompting police investigation
A nursery school 'teacher from hell' is under criminal investigation after harrowing CCTV footage showed her 'beating two year old children' in her care. The teacher - named as Zhanel Musken, 29 - hit and slapped the infants, pulled their hair, shook and pushed them, and roughly changed their clothes, it is alleged. A total of 15 suffered injuries, revealed Saule Shakeneva, the regional children's rights commissioner in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. 'The number of children may well increase,' she warned. The teacher was suspended after distraught parents complained to police. Footage of the alleged abuse was then seized by police from Kindergarten Number 116 in Pavlodar. It shows fear on the faces of children as the teacher conducted her alleged reign of terror in the classroom. She faces a possible jail sentence if convicted of abusing the infants. She is said to have ten years of experience of working with children, despite her alleged violence In one terrifying instance, the woman aggressively shakes one child's head continuously before yanking them to the ground. Another disturbing scene shows her pulling a boy's ears and screaming at him as the scared boy tries to avoid her gaze. She violently pulls off other kids' outfits, forcefully pulls their arms, and hits their midsection as their frightened friends look on. Further footage sees her vigorously grab a boy's feet as he tumbles on the floor, hitting his head. 'Most of the children are too young to speak properly yet,' said a local report citing Shakeneva. Yet some parents were concerned by bruises and the behaviour of their children. 'The children were assigned a forensic medical examination, and the parents and children were offered psychological help,' said the report. The teacher was reported to be experienced, with ten years working in nursery schools, and was seen as caring before the scandal was revealed. Khava Bolkoyeva, aunt of an 'abused' child, told local TV: 'She hit [my niece] on the head, on the back, threw her around, as if she wasn't a real person but some kind of toy. 'She has almost no hair because it was constantly being pulled. 'There are bruises on her body and she constantly complains about her stomach. Maybe she throws her around, hits her. 'We were at the examination this morning. Now we have written to the prosecutor's office and we are going to a lawyer. We want to see this case through to the end.' She added: 'This is a video of just one day. And she does all this without fear of the cameras. 'It is scary to imagine how often she allowed herself such violence.' The teacher could face charges of 'failure to fulfil the duties of raising a minor by the person to whom they are assigned'. But parents want to see children abuse laws used against the teacher for the alleged beatings.
The Verge
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The photographer using AI to reconstruct stories lost to censorship
Video screens glow softly from the floor, looping footage of salt lakes, steppe villages, and decaying nuclear test sites. Suspended above them is a large handwoven textile map, crafted by artisans in Kazakhstan. The tapestry maps 12 significant sites across Kazakhstan and the surrounding region, each corresponding to one of the flickering videos below. This is Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3, the latest large-scale installation by photographer and multimedia artist Almagul Menlibayeva. Recently unveiled at the VRHAM! Digital & Immersive Art Biennale in Hamburg, Germany, the work is part of Menlibayeva's ongoing series of 'cyber textiles,' which offer a striking blend of craft and code. It imagines an alternative cartography of Central Asia, with each video in the installation infusing the locations with erased histories and traditions, putting forth an alternative future for them. While the tapestries are created by hand, the videos are a mixture of real and replicated, built from documentary footage captured by Menlibayeva and then augmented with AI to infuse feminist rituals, nomadic storytelling traditions, and whispers of endangered languages. Menlibayeva's approach to artificial intelligence isn't rooted in fascination with high-tech innovation for its own sake. Rather, it's part of a deeper reckoning — with history, with loss, and with the systems that shape how stories are remembered or erased. She engages with AI not as a neutral tool, but as a terrain of power, ideology, and potential transformation. 'Perhaps my interest in artificial intelligence is rooted in the traumatic history of Kazakh nomads,' she says, recalling how Soviet-era collectivization dismantled her ancestors' way of life under the guise of technological progress. Born in Kazakhstan and educated in the Soviet art system, Menlibayeva's early training in folk textiles and Russian futurism is evident in her layered, hybrid works, which centered on photography and multichannel video installations for many years. Since 2022, she has expanded her practice to include AI, marking a pivotal evolution in her decades-long engagement with themes of historical erasure, cultural survival, and ecological trauma. Across these mediums, Menlibayeva critiques the lingering impacts of Soviet rule in Central Asia — from ecological degradation to cultural erasure — while reviving Indigenous and nomadic histories long overwritten by empire. With AI, she's found a way to confront and reanimate these stories. AI Realism: Qantar 2022 was Menlibayeva's first project to incorporate AI. It's a visceral example of how she uses AI to build counternarratives. Created in response to the Bloody January protests in Kazakhstan — mass demonstrations that were violently suppressed by the state and subsequently censored in national media — the project constructs a synthetic memoryscape from collective trauma. During the protests, the Kazakh government imposed a near-total internet blackout, plunging the nation into an information vacuum. Faced with this blockade, Menlibayeva began collecting protest-2related stories from friends and social media, extracting key phrases in Kazakh and Russian, as well as voice messages sent via landlines and mobile networks. These fragments of real speech became the raw material for AI Realism: Qantar 2022. 'The situation itself pushed me, because when these political events happened, the internet was shut down in the whole country,' she recalls. 'I used audio recordings of voice messages, words these people used, to generate images of this work.' Working with text-to-image and voice-to-image models via Google Colab, Menlibayeva assembled a series of AI-generated images from those crowdsourced stories. The resulting artwork, a 24-minute video and a series of haunting stills, is nonlinear and emotionally charged, confronting the erasure — both state-sanctioned and otherwise — of the events from memory. 'I knew that the conditions, the events, would be forgotten or deliberately erased,' she says. 'In this work, the people's words are the main material. That is why the project is called AI Realism.' The image Search and Seizure. History of Kairat Sultanbek. Kazakh January (2022), which is part of this series, reveals a chaos of bloodied surfaces and fragmented bodies. But it resists straightforward interpretation: there is no clear sequence of events and no clear heroes. 'AI machines have a large limit, but sometimes system errors give rise to interesting results,' Menlibayeva says. In AI Realism: Qantar 2022, those glitches evoke the ruptures in history itself: the erasures, silences, and distortions enforced by both state violence and data-driven platforms. Menlibayeva's process often starts analog, with her own photographs or video stills — or even embroidered motifs passed down from older generations. These materials are transformed using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Perplexity. For video-related work, tools including Deforum, Runway, and Kaiber AI are used, but not without friction. 'My first stage is to find the right prompt. Then I choose the most suitable platform based on how well it performs for that specific idea. Each platform has its own strengths, limitations, and biases, so I adapt my approach accordingly,' she says. While some celebrate AI's democratizing potential, Menlibayeva remains wary. 'AI is a complex tool with both democratizing potential and the risk of reinforcing new hierarchies,' she warns, noting that 'AI systems are often controlled by large corporations, which influences access and power.' So, why use them at all? Menlibayeva doesn't believe AI creates anything truly new, only what data makes possible. But by inserting her own images, myths, and archives, she sees it as opening a dialogue between algorithmic systems and human history. 'AI acts both as a tool and a distorted mirror, reflecting the hidden codes, preferences, and limitations of its creators: data, culture, and power,' she says. 'I consciously engage with these biases, embedding my personal mythologies into the process.' To Menlibayeva, 'humanizing AI' doesn't mean teaching machines to mimic empathy. Instead, it means embedding human stories, memories, and resistance into their logic. In her art, AI becomes a way to recover what state archives, history books, and dominant media refuse to hold. 'That is why, as an artist, I try not to obey this logic, but to transform it. Humanizing AI is not the task of programmers, it is the task of artists,' she says.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Becker on first Wimbledon title: 'Suddenly this freedom was gone'
Former German tennis player Boris Becker attends the Men's singles final tennis match of the Terra Wortmann Open between Kazakhstan's Alexander Bublik and Russian Daniil Medvedev. David Inderlied/dpa Boris Becker has said that his maiden Wimbledon title in 1985 as a 17-year-old not only resulted in positives, and that his inner strength helped him throughout his tennis career and life. Becker became a German and global sensation with his triumph 40 years ago. He went on to win two more Wimbledons and a total six grand slams, and was world number one. Advertisement Looking back ahead of Monday's start of the latest Wimbledon, he told Stern magazine that "the whole country embraced me" after the 1985 success. "It was certainly meant kindly, but they almost crushed me and took away my air to breathe. I was always a freedom-loving person, and suddenly this freedom was gone," Becker said. "People suddenly looked at me with different eyes, even my parents. Boy, what were you doing there? That was their attitude. My parents had known me for 17 and a half years up until then, but they didn't realise that I had this strength in me." Becker said this strength helped him throughout life on and off the court. Advertisement "I survived as a prodigy. I survived the 17-year-old Boris Becker and everything that came after that," he said. I have this character trait: I survive. You can put me in the jungles of Vietnam - I'll find a way to survive. You can put me in prison - and I'll find a way to survive." This also helped him get through a prison term in Britain after being convicted for for withholding assets in a bankruptcy case. "As they say: in a serious crisis, you're all alone. Yes, that's how it was with me," he said. However, he highlighted that his current wife, Lilian De Carvalho Monteiro, with whom he now lives in Milan, remained by his side. 'That is remarkable, because she could only be interested in me as a person because I had nothing else to offer. I had never met a woman like her before," he said.
