KZBlog is going down (2)
After some thought, I have decided not to renew KZBLog’s lease. As you may have noticed, I don’t do a lot of posting here anymore. I don’t have time to blog regularly. Thus I am taking the site down–it does generate some ad revenue but not as much as it costs to keep it up. […]
Culture
- Yurts Are High Fashion and Slum Fashion Too
2011-12-05 - Apples, Sure. But THC is from Kazakhstan too?
2011-10-05 - Naked Man Pot
2011-09-23
- Yurts Are High Fashion and Slum Fashion Too
Resources
- Oh, CNN
2012-07-21 - What Do You Know About Kazakhstan?
2012-07-19 - Books for Kazakh Students
2011-11-06
- Oh, CNN
Politics
- Image
2011-07-28 - Sub Rosa Endorsement
2011-07-26 - The Naked Truth
2011-06-12
- Image
News
- KZBlog is going down
2013-09-10 - Oh, CNN
2012-07-21 - Repentence
2012-07-15
- KZBlog is going down
Fun
- What Do You Know About Kazakhstan?
2012-07-19 - Yurts Are High Fashion and Slum Fashion Too
2011-12-05 - House Hunters Bishkek
2011-12-02
- What Do You Know About Kazakhstan?
Tourism
- Asian Games Torch
2011-01-12 - Wikitravel
2010-08-07 - ALZHIR, the Soviets and Democracy
2010-07-30
- Asian Games Torch
Life in KZ
- Photo Gallery: Almaty Subway
2011-12-07 - Healthcare and the Private Sector
2011-11-30 - Naked Man Pot
2011-09-23
- Photo Gallery: Almaty Subway
Redbubble
Rehashing the Contador-Astana Feud (Comments Off on Rehashing the Contador-Astana Feud)
In researching my last post, I reread a bunch of articles on why Contador left Astana. Although there were issues when Armstrong was riding with them regarding pay and of course, the team almost lost its license at one point, it looks like mens sports equipment was the big issue or the straw that broke the cyclist’s back. So to speak.
I seem to remember Lance and Alberto talking about having to buy certain cycling equipment when they were abroad because they couldn’t get good quality stuff in Kazakhstan, but I can’t find a source on that. However, well sourced are the frequent radio breakdowns during last year’s Tour de France. More importantly Contador blames the breakdown a TV in the Astana pace car for Chaingate, when Andy Schleck, the leader, had to stop to change his chain. Although it’s bad form to try to beat the leader when he has a pit stop, Contador didn’t know he’d stopped and thus charged on ahead.
So it seems unlikely that Contador would want to return to Astana in any way, shape or form.
Team Saxo Astana Bank? (Comments Off on Team Saxo Astana Bank?)
L’Equipe, a French sports website, has an interesting article up. They claim that the CFO of Team Astana wants to merge with Saxo Bank or Liquigas. What’s interesting about this story is that apparently no one else on Team Astana knew anything about this, although L’Equipe claims that Aidar Makhmetov, newly appointed as chief financial officer, has already contacted both teams.
Furthermore, it appears that Makhmetov offered Liquigas the use of Kazakhstan gas supply facilities in exchange for the use of their top rider, Vincenzo Nibali. Since when does the CFO of a sports team have the ability to negotiate with the oil and gas infrastructure of a country? (Velonation reports that Astana was willing to pay 3 million Euros to Liquigas and 1.5 million a year to Nibali for 2 years just to buy him outright.
Finally, should Saxobank agree, that would bring Alberto Contador back into the Astana orbit. Contador seemed to have pretty well burned his bridges with Astana, and vice versa. In fact recently, Team Astana released a statement that they supported Contador’s temporary suspension. So how Alberto would feel about being merged back into the team, I don’t know. And how Vinokourov, who plans to retire next year and will likely be given a management role, would feel about Contador coming back or these machinations happening without his knowledge is unclear.
I suspect, however, that either this will all turn out to be a misunderstanding or that any offers will be withdrawn.
In Every Joke There’s a Bit of Truth (Comments Off on In Every Joke There’s a Bit of Truth)
Someone in the Kazakhstan government just got fired and blacklisted. Last week, the Parliament of Kazakhstan was to ratify the Customs Union between Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Russia which was agreed upon last year and will go into full effect this July. However the signing was delayed when it was discovered that someone mixed up Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko!
According to a Member of the Kazakhstan Parliament, the document read:
Signed for the Republic of Belarus – Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, for the Republic of Kazakhstan – President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, for the Russian Federation – President of Belarus Vladimir Putin
Given the tension between Russia and Belarus in recent years, one wonders if this was an honest mistake, a bit of satire, or a jab at both countries.
Those of us who live in Astana and have friends who work for the government will also suspect that the people who physically drafted, typed, printed and delivered these documents were forced to work overnight several nights in a row. So perhaps this is a call to ensure that the government gives its workers reasonable hours!
More on the Carbomb in Astana (Comments Off on More on the Carbomb in Astana)
Found a good report on the car bombing of the KNB detention center in Astana that occurred on 24 May of this year, including some disturbing details and photographs of the damage.
Apparently the blast was strong enough that neighbors 50-60 meters away found bits of steel Buildings in the area were also damaged, with windows blown in and walls hit by shrapnel.
An anonymous letter to Tengri News recounts the events:
I live in a five-storied building on Karasai batyr street. At 3.31 a.m. the windows in our house started trembling, there was a loud blast and windows were broken in places by the blast wave. I ran outside and came up to the blast area where people have already started gathered. There I saw a red Audi C4 with a Pavlodar plate number. I saw a part of a human body with my own eyes (I didn’t see the second person, I saw only one) under the windows of a nearby two-storied building. Body parts were even in my building’s yard, almost 200 meters from the site. I found the documents, the cell phone. Both men (killed in the blast) were ethnic Russian. It is quite possible that it was not a terroristic act, as the car owner is part of a hunters’ society (the society ID was among the documents). Maybe the car had explosives used for fish inside, I don’t know. The fact is that the blast was very strong and the car parts flew apart many meters from the incident site. The emergency teams were slow. The first car (they were district police officers) came 20-25 minutes after. It took the rest even longer to arrive. Firemen arrived after 40 minutes. There was almost nothing left of the car, just a pile of metal.
Self-Immolation Protest in Astana (Comments Off on Self-Immolation Protest in Astana)
According to Kazakhstan Today, this morning, a woman set herself on fire in the public reception of Nur-Otan in Astana. There’s not a lot of official information out yet, but apparently she was protesting the conviction of her son. And she is apparently alive and in the hospital.
A comment on zakon.kz claims that the son was accused of stabbing and beating up three men in a cafe.
Whether or not the son was guilty, the troubling fact remains that this woman felt there was no recourse for justice for her and that she felt that Nurotan was somehow culpable or involved in the same institutions as the court system. In the wake of this act, prisoner protests involving self-mutilation, strikes in Mangistau and possibly the bombings on KNB offices in Astana and Aktobe, the government should take a long hard look at whether or not people feel they have just representation and free avenues to appeal the decisions of officials. Otherwise tragic protests like this one will only continue.
Grandfather’s Google (Comments Off on Grandfather’s Google)
Either because of the fuss made over it, or because of a genuine legal issue, Kazakhstan will allow Google to use google.kz. Google wrote a post saying that Kazakhstan had asked them to shut down google.kz or move the servers physically to Kazakhstan. An update on the Google blog post now says that the law requiring all .kz domains to have servers located in Kazakhstan was passed after google.kz was registered. Therefore the law doesn’t apply.
Micheal Hancock wrote a good piece saying that this incident was unfairly framed as evil censoring government vs. company, which I thought was a good point. Even though the Kazakhstan government has given plenty of reason to believe that they are for Internet censorship (c.f. this recent statement by Nazarbayev about the “threat” of the Internet), in this case they are only regulating .kz sites, not blocking any sites or accusing Google of crimes.
For what it’s worth, this statement claiming to be from Isin, who heads the Association of IT Companies in Kazakhstan (which administrates the .kz domain) came my way. I’m too lazy to translate it, but it basically says what I said above: Laws cannot be applied retroactively, therefore existing registered sites on the .kz domain do not have to follow the new policy.
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MPs Too Busy to Pay (Comments Off on MPs Too Busy to Pay)
I’ve mentioned before the phenomenon in Kazakhstan that people don’t pay their utility bills. Often, when I complain about this, people tell me that those who don’t pay are too poor. However when I see my neighbors driving Porsche Cayennes and new BMWs (or reporting robberies of 5 computers from their apartment), I find it hard to believe that they are poor. Now here’s proof that the rich and powerful don’t pay their bills.
Senator Muktar Alytnbayev admits that he failed to pay his utility bills on his house. It’s reported that he owes approximately one million tenge, which would be around $7000. Our largest utility bill ever was around $400 (in the middle of a very cold winter and our building management had some extra expenses). Taking that as a base, Altynbayev didn’t pay his bills for 16 months!
But for someone who participates in approving the laws for the country, he has a good excuse. He forgot. And it’s his assistant’s fault anyway.
Unfortunately, I made the list [of people who didn’t pay their bills]. Everyone makes mistakes. In the first place, I am to blame, of course. I apologize to the public and to the utility companies. Well, let’s say that this mistake was made by one of my assistants. This issue was solved yesterday and by the end of today this issue will be resolved. It’s not that I don’t have money, it’s just I missed the deadline.
Why the Senator, who is a former Minister of Defense and General, expects his assistant at work to remember details of his personal home is another question. The scandal has also raised the question of whether Altynbayev had the right to lease his home to an Arabian embassy, as he did. There is a question of conflict of interest, I suppose, as well as whether an MP can get money from a foreign government.
The article on zakon.kz also claims that the list of powerful people who have not paid their bills includes the names Akmetov (former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense) and Amrin (former head of the Innovation Fund, and head of the KNB). The blacklist came out when the President ordered city governments to publish lists of debtors publicly. I would have made announcements before the news of Khabar, complete with photos, names, addresses and photos of their cars. But the President’s idea seems to have been succesfull as well.
Sometimes We’re Just Asking for the Borat Jokes (Comments Off on Sometimes We’re Just Asking for the Borat Jokes)
If this doesn’t turn out to be a fake, it appears that two men from Kazakhstan drove to Germany, bought an Audi, and brought it back by shoving it into the back of a van. Obviously to pull that off they must buy testoripped. Unless (as one commentator suggested) they flipped the van on its side, drove the car in, and then just flipped the van back up.
I certainly believe that people from Kazakhstan will do a lot to avoid paying taxes and also to avoid buying extra equipment to do things properly. I also know that a great number of people do drive to Europe, buy a car, bring it back and sell it. I have a hard time believing they pulled this off. And I also find it hard to believe we have such quality pictures of it, sitting in what looks like a nice little compound of some kind. I’m guessing this is not a picture taken by two guys who just bought a car at the auto-bazar, nor is it a shot taken by the police on the side of the road.
In any case, it’s a funny little story and if it is true, I’m afraid these two guys have no right to be annoyed by comparisons to Borat.
Google.kz Equals Google.com (1)
Following a new law in Kazakhstan that all sites with a .kz domain must have its servers physically located inside Kazakhstan’s borders, Google announced that it will redirect google.kz to google.com. In blog post accusing the government of Kazakhstan of trying to restrict the Internet, Bill Coughran, SVP, Research & Systems Infrastructure, wrote:
Some governments, however, are attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy…
We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet…
Measures that force Internet companies to choose between taking actions that harm the open web, or reducing the quality of their services, hurt users. We encourage governments and other stakeholders to work together to preserve an open Internet, which empowers local users, boosts local economies and encourages innovation around the globe.
Presumably the goal of the Ministry of Communication and Information’s new policy (which has been…) is to more easily enforce strict laws which went into effect last year. These laws define the Internet as another form of media and thus under the same laws that apply to the press, such as slander, restrictions on criticizing the Leader of the Nation or his family, and revealing state secrets. Furthermore the law holds site owners culpable for comments made on their sites (so please don’t leave illegal comments here). People leaving comments on blogs have been convicted before. Not to mention the shut down of Sascha Baron Cohen’s .kz website dedicated to Borat. Obviously, if the site has servers located in Kazakhstan it will be much easier for the authorities to shut down a site or get their hands around the sys-admins’ necks.
While this policy may not do much to affect small sites like mine (I’m ok not having a .kz domain), Kazakhstan may suffer as international web-based services like Google decide it is not worth it to rent a space for servers in Kazakhstan, transport equipment here, hire people to look after it, fill out all the bureaucratic paperwork necessary to register, put up with the fact that many sites are blocked by KazTransCom, and find qualified IT workers here. Some have argued that the new law will boost the economy, but frankly I suspect centers that host servers don’t usually hire a lot of people or do a lot of business. It’s basically a room with a lot of computers and a guy to make sure nothing breaks (Am I correct? Narcogen and Chris Merriman, I’m looking at you).
So what will happen is that web services will not provide customized information and services for Kazakhstan. For example, google.kz gives consideration to Kazakh-language and Russian language resources and .kz resources in its search results. Google.com not so much. Online retailers could offer .kz sites that highlight products of interest to local consumers as well as information about Kazakhstani suppliers, distributors and contacts. Airlines could feature flights in and out of Kazakhstan. And so on. And the benefit is simply that if a website does a bad, bad thing, Kazakhstan can punish them more effectively. Of course, many web companies may be willing to locate a server here, but balk at the idea that they are being treated as potential law-breakers.
In short, the authorities are once again putting control and fear ahead of services to the population and economy development.
Global Voices has already put up an article on this with some great commentary from Kazakhstani bloggers and a funny cartoon.
The Naked Truth (1)
This is one way to promote a new website: Guljan Yergaliyeva, who resigned as editor of the Svoboda Slova newspaper in January in protest against government repression of the media, particularly during the push to pass a referendum to extend the President’s term until 2020, has launched a new media site Guljan. As a symbol of the independence and directness of the new site, Ms. Yergaliyeva has put up a video on Youtube of herself stripping:
The site features the slogan, “Better the naked truth than a well-dressed lie”
Haven’t had time to peruse her site in detail, but the headlines cover problems with the oil industry in the west, high mortgages, questions about the Nurbank controversy and links to blogs by Zhovtis and Abilov. So she isn’t shying away from touchy issues.
Any thoughts on this from other media savvy readers?
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