Worldcrunch
Social distancing, disinfecting common areas and accessing health care: All three key tactics for curbing the spread of coronavirus are particularly complicated inside jails and prisons. While it might seem like an already self-isolating bubble, life inside prisons has changed dramatically since COVID-19 arrived. In an effort to keep healthy, many have lost their rights […]
Welcome to Wednesday, where a second Chinese vaccine gets WHO’s greenlight, Sri Lanka faces its worst maritime disaster ever and an asparagus recipe makes its way into a Belgian legal decree. Meanwhile, our latest edition of Work → In Progress takes the pulse of the work-life balance in a fully-vaccinated future. • COVID travel system […]
I’ve shared photos before of a trip to central Turkey’s Göreme National Park, with its troglodyte cave-like dwellings and fairy chimney rock formations. Only recently did I dig up this image from a visit a few years earlier, and was reminded of how strange and powerful the landscape is.
-OpEd- MOSCOW — Despite the predictions before this past week’s NATO summit of a major split in the alliance, and some awkward moments among its respective leaders, the meeting itself concluded without any real substantive complications. Even traditional anti-globalist clashes we’ve come to expect from these kinds of gatherings were absent. As for Russia, it […]
MOSCOW — For the first time, the U.S. Congress has recognized the mass killings and deportations in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 as genocide. So why now? It doesn’t seem that the United States has anything really to gain from the country of Armenia. Two of the four borders of the country are […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The USA betrayed the Kurds. This was the blunt interpretation from Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the Turkey-Russia agreement on northeast Syria signed earlier this week in Sochi. The Kurds have been the Americans’ most loyal allies in Syria, yet Washington abandoned them. Now Kurdish military units […]
Turkey has forced the Syrian Kurds into an astonishing trap, leaving hundreds of thousands with little choice but to flee.
My clearest camel memory from this same trip to Turkey 30 years ago was witnessing the millennia-old tradition of camel wrestling. Just a few miles down the road, near the Ancient Greek site of Ephesus, this fellow was in the mood for nothing of the sort.
ISTANBUL — One of the more prestigious duties for the pilots of the Turkish Air Forces during the Cold War years was the “nuclear watch.” The four main air bases in Turkey had been housing U.S. nuclear warheads since the beginning of the 1960’s. The nuclear class planes piloted by Turks were assigned to drop […]
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently said he favored restoring the death penalty. It would bring back an ugly face of Turkey, both politically and morally.
Ekrem Imamoglu’s victory in the recent rerun election in Istanbul was a breath of fresh air for Turkish democracy. But to really recover lost ground, the country needs a new set of rules, writes Yakup Kepenek.
For the first time in 25 years, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will not be running Turkey’s biggest city. With his landmark victory in Sunday’s election rerun, Ekrem Imamoglu will be the new mayor of Istanbul, with significance that reaches well beyond the city’s 15 million residents. Imamoglu, who won easily 54% to […]
I found striking cityscapes all around the world, from the feng-shui buildings of Honk Kong to Rio de Janeiro’s lush bay and the odd-looking houses of Indonesian villages — but to me there’s nothing quite like Turkey’s “fairy chimneys,” the ancient troglodyte structures of the country’s Cappadocia region.
Political Scientist Soner Cagaptay once dubbed Recep Tayyip Erdogan the “inventor of 21st-century populism.” There may be some truth to that, especially given the way the Turkish president’s style of leadership has quickly spread in recent years. But as we progress further into the millennium, it’s also clear that populism has evolved. Those with a […]
Turkey’s president first burst on the scene in 1994 when he was elected mayor of Istanbul. Now, his party tries to hold the city.
In Algeria, the Bouteflika clan was driven out of power. In Turkey, Erdogan’s AKP has “only” lost ground in the big cities. In both cases, the government’s legitimacy is being deeply questioned, in a context of economic recession and democratic demands.
Turkey’s politics has been shaken up after President Erdogan’s ruling AKP lost major cities in nationwide municipal elections. Results in the biggest city hang in the balance.
With no other elections set for the coming years and the AKP party’s increasing use of bully tactics, Turkey’s local poll is a last chance to send a true political message.
The indictments filed against prominent liberal figures after the 2013 Gezi park protests show the government doesn’t care about defending the constitution.
As Turkey takes sole responsibility from UNHCR for processing the asylum claims of Afghans and other non-Syrians, it must register them and allow them to access their basic rights.
Our travels didn’t exactly involve many days at the beach. But as we drove in the Turkish heat, we paused here and there so our 13 year-old little mermaid Cécile could splash around. Times like these, my wife Claudine and I regretted never having taken swimming lessons when we were kids.
One of my two granddaughters used to live in Özdere, a quiet village on the Turkish coast near Izmir. I went there a couple of times, taking the opportunity to visit the nearby ruins of the Ancient Greek site of Ephesus — and snapping this picture on the street, of a much more modern kind […]
-Analysis- Turkey is a country with extreme social differences. If the inflation rate rises, the lira tumbles and price stickers in supermarkets are rewritten daily, which means those who already have little can afford less and less. The current currency crisis is making the poor even poorer. But it will not spare the rich for […]
The ‘sudden stop’ scenario has hit the Turkish economy, which threatens other countries around the world — and not just economically.
Ince, a social democrat, is now the opposition’s leading presidential candidate. With support from Kurdish voters, he may even force a runoff.
The only thing more impressive than beholding the ancient troglodyte structures of Turkey’s Cappadocia region, was realizing that yes, some people still actually lived in them!
The Mevlana mausoleum in Konya, central Turkey, is considered a staple of Islamic architecture — and rightly so: I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many minarets!
There are times when silence speaks louder than words, and right now — with the new escalation of violence in Syria, where airstrikes in a rebel enclave have killed at least 335 people since the beginning of the week — is one of them. That’s why the United Nations Children’s Fund reacted to the reports […]
The remains of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can be found in present-day in the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum. It was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before it was destroyed by earthquakes. Tant pis ! Some 700 kilometers north is Ankara’s tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first […]
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a historic visit to Rome on Monday, the first time a Turkish leader has met the Pope at the Vatican in nearly six decades. But the visit to Italy, which included meetings with top Italian leaders, comes as Turkey’s military is engaged in heavy conflict with Kurdish […]
To beat the gloominess of a rainy winter afternoon, I put aside my book and went through my sunny slides of Turkey. This one shows the road leading to the Library of Celsus in Ephesus.
Turkish schools are taking steps to cultivate a ‘pious generation’ by rewriting history and placing a greater emphasis on religion.
PARIS — Why does a nation of 75 million share a name with a holiday fowl? Is it mere linguistic coincidence? Some unsolved historical-ornithological riddle? A bad idea for a cookbook? Here is how Reference.com’s dictionary talks turkey: In the 1540s, the guinea fowl, a bird with some resemblance to the Thanksgiving avian, was imported from Madagascar through Turkey by traders known as Turkish merchants. … Then, the Spaniards brought turkeys back to the Americas by way of North Africa and Turkey, where the bird was mistakenly called the same name. Europeans who encountered the bird in the Americas latched […]
-Essay- When you’re living abroad, Thanksgiving can sneak up on you. So when my dad sent me a message Wednesday night — “About to run my last errand for Mom (hopefully)” — I had absolutely no clue what he could be talking about. Then, it hit me. He was out grocery shopping for the big […]
That’s not snow: During the summer, Lake Tuz in central Turkey dries up, revealing a thick layer of salt. My wife Claudine and daughter Cécile were gearing up against the August sun as we pulled our Peugeot 404 over to the side of the road.
A government crackdown on dissent in Turkish cinema is transforming filmmaking and destroying careers.
-Analysis- Donald Trump, the world’s biggest cyberbully, has issued another Twitter threat. The target this time wasn’t North Korea’s “Rocket Man,” but another favorite: the media. Yesterday, hours after NBC News aired a report claiming the president wanted a “nearly tenfold” increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Trump took to social media to retaliate. In […]
-Analysis- Even as the European Union has wavered on whether to let Turkey into its exclusive grouping, Ankara has flexed its muscles within the bloc. It has done so by using a shared tool and resource to fight crime: Interpol. Last Saturday, Spanish authorities arrested author Dogan Akhanli after Turkey issued an Interpol arrest warrant […]
What kind of a world do we live in, when Turkey can’t even give us a proper coup anymore? Unable to sleep for the summer heat in Valencia, I remember that twisted thought coming to me as the July 15 coup — or at least its broadcast version — was unfolding on the radio. Typically […]
Libération, July 24, 2017 Leading French daily Libération showed its support for embattled Turkish opposition daily Cumhuriyet, as a trial gets underway for 17 journalists and staff members on charges of aiding a terrorist organization. The front page for this special Libération with Cumhuriyet edition features a cartoon — a meaningful choice of expression in […]