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11,000 Years in the Making
11,000 years ago, someone carved a human riding a leopard. Archaeologists have uncovered a 70-cm stone sculpture at Karahantepe, near Göbeklitepe in Türkiye.
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Russia Turns to Turkey for Fuel
Russia is buying gasoline from Turkey for the first time in history. A tanker loaded with around 200,000 barrels of gasoline has departed from Mersin for Russia, one of the world's biggest oil exporters, now importing fuel.
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Central Asia's blackout has turned into a very awkward Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan dispute
On August 14, a major power failure swept across parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, hitting Almaty hardest, disrupting the metro, traffic lights and public transport. Now the region's two biggest players can't agree on who's to blame.
Kazakhstan says
Grid operator KEGOC blames Kyrgyzstan's Toktogul hydropower plant, saying two generators (600MW) disconnected around 2:37pm, triggering a grid overload that cascaded across the region.
Kyrgyzstan says
Its grid operator says the external failure actually originated on a high-voltage line inside Kazakhstan around 2:34pm, three minutes before the Toktogul shutdown even happened.
With timelines conflicting by just three minutes, theories are flying: a technical cascade failure, operator error, a malfunctioning protection system, extreme summer power demand, or (unconfirmed) a cyberattack or sabotage. Central Asia's power grid remains tightly interconnected, a legacy of Soviet-era infrastructure, meaning a fault in one country can ripple through its neighbors within seconds.
Adding to the intrigue: a day earlier, on August 13, Telegram suffered a nationwide disruption in Kazakhstan. Kazakhtelecom said traffic to Telegram's international peering points in Frankfurt and Moscow had dropped sharply. No confirmed link to the blackout has been established, but the timing hasn't gone unnoticed.
Kazakhstan: blames Toktogul's shutdown.
Kyrgyzstan: blames a Kazakh grid line failure.
The internet: suspects sabotage or a cyberattack.
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The latest reporting and culture from across the Turkic world.