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#147 | Photos / videos from tonight in Athens:
Athens police clash with youths
All eyes in the world should be on the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference as we wait with a stuttering heartbeat to learn about the policies that will guide humanity through the next great evolutionary bottleneck. The topic I will be keeping an eye on is overpopulation.
Beşiktaş kids at the game…
Last Friday, Beşiktaş lost two important points in a draw against Diyarbakırspor but on Saturday and Sunday, Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray also points. So not a big deal for the moment. And now comes the day again….
CSKA Moscow faces Besiktas – – SI.com
All on the line in Istanbul
UEFA.com
… Group B. CSKA must secure more points in Istanbul than Wolfsburg manage at home to Manchester United FC to be sure of entering the first knockout round…
Luck for us:
The pair had tested positive for a banned substance after the Champions League match away to Manchester United on Nov. 3, UEFA said in a statement. …
by Ahmet Turgut
Di, is one of the most loyal followers of this blog. She has also become a dear friend to me. She started as an amateur blogger with a blog from Blogspot but gradually she had proved herself as a good photographer and now she has her own domain and she exhibits her stuff and activities. … Read more
Newsy.com videos analyze and synthesize news stories from multiple sources. Its unique method of showing how different media cover the news helps viewers better understand complex stories. [Thanks Helen!]
Ethnic and religious minorities in Europe continue to suffer from discrimination and prejudice and face disadvantages in a whole host of areas, from employment and education to housing and policing, a report published yesterday (3 December) by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) reveals.
Is it a coincidence that 7 Turkish soldiers are killed probably by Kurdish guerillas, a Kurdish demonstrator killed in riots, and a civilian dies wounded by Kurdish rioters in 48 hours?
All have their own genealogies, but happening at the same moment signifies a conspiracy of parties against further democratization. It is ironic to see that both pro-Kurdish activists and nationalist Turks are campaigning against government’s Democratization Initiative a.k.a. Kurdish initiative. Both militaristic and both will lose initiative if the Initiative has success…
here comes: Gov’t said it postponed to discuss an amendment to lower down charges against under-age demonstrators….
Serap Eser died today. She was burnt in high degrees when rioters threw molotov cocktails to a public bus…Facebook page.
Aydın Erdem, a demonstrator, a college student, was killed yesterday during pro-PKK riots with a bullet…Facebook page.
AFP: One dead as violence flares in Turkey protests
May god bless their souls, those 7 soldiers killed today:
Uzman çavuş Harun Arslanbey (Adana); erler: Onur Bozdemir (Adıyaman), Kemal Pide (Ordu), Ferit Demir (Muş), Yakup Mutlu (Muş), Cengiz Sarıbaş (Giresun) ve Fatih Yonca?nın (Hatay)
HUMAN RIGHTS RELATED ROUNDUP FOLLOWS
I had stopped shortly in a blogger/new media training session last Friday, that focused on Eurasian bloggers and new media people. You can check their work here:
Eurasian Stories | Digital Stories from Eurasia
and videos made in the workshop:
http://eurasianstories.blip.tv/
I have met Eric who works with a website called Sesawe. This site offers great tools and recommendations to circumvent web censorship. In their site:
| Yemen | Egypt | Syria | Cambodia | Kyrgyzstan | Moldova |
| France | North Korea | Kazakhstan | Morocco | Sri Lanka | China |
| Saudia Arabia | Ethiopia | Turkey | Belarus | Thailand | Sudan |
CHECK OUT MORE AT Sesawe
My brief notes from Eric’s speech:
Next monday, dec 7, the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference finally start in Copenhagen. All visitors who came by aeroplane (…) will see these billboards at the Copenhagen Airport. They campaign from Greenpeace shows our world leaders in 2020.
The leaders: Sarkozy (FR), Merkel (Ger), Obama (USA), Tusk (PO), Lula (Br), Zapatero (Es), Brown (UK) and Harper (Can). See them all after the break.
As I was not too excited with his election, I am not too disappointed with Obama’s moves on Afghanistan. In fact, I remember he was repeatingly on Afghanistan instead of Iraq. Now PM Erdoğan will be meeting with President Obama. It is reported that Obama wants soldiers from Turkey. The latter does not intend to give any. I hope TR-US relations will go through another bitter period…
Hugh Pope, the International Crisis Group’s Turkey analyst — who just returned from a two-month fellowship at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington — has a new paper out ahead of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Monday visit to the White House. The paper, published by the Transatlantic Academy, takes a close look at two areas in which Washington has an interest in pushing Ankara along, its normalization process with Armenia and its European Union membership process, and also helpfully unpackages the debate over Turkey’s perceived eastward “drift.”
A super post:
Now I remember why I dislike academic conferences so much:
1. I don?t like having papers read to me (does anyone?).
2. I don?t like having one image projected on a screen and never changed for the 15 minutes when someone is reading to me.
3. I don?t like time hogs who use up discussion time: there is never time for discussion
4. I don?t like constant references to failed technology or unfamiliarity with projectors, computers, presentation software, or DVDs.
5. I don?t like that most presenters have no clue how to construct a text slide: your squinting audience is not proof that they are intensely interested. The fact is they can?t see what you wrote in your 12 point type.
6. I don?t like ?, well, you get the idea.
Started the day with brunch at La Mekan (I will definitely post about this place) with Can. It is just in walking distance to our apartment. To start the day there always makes me happy. It satisfies my quest for a good diner like I used to have in Houston. Then I moved to santralistanbul to my office and spent the day until evening there. Youth Studies Unit was having a hip hop workshop with high school kids, otherwise I haven’t seen any colleagues and I did hang out in my office alone. No one would complain of loud music. How nice. I got tired of longer hair and had an haircut in our campus hairdresser, now I am as if I have just come from the Service, then I had more coffee and did some more work and when it was around 8 pm as no body was left in the building, I began to feel self-pity and it was time to leave.
Then the second and more colorful part of my day began: Thanks to Çiğdem Buğdaycı, I first stopped by a small art galery in Cihangir: Çukurcumart. Not always but on some Saturdays there are Jam sessions there. We attended one yesterday. We were offered super quality wine, warm, cinnamon, juicy..
Here a few drawings exhibited in the gallery (more can be found in the Facebook page:
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.903832&w=425&h=350&fv=uid%3Dgp_592909]
istanbul 2010 agency launched a new promotion campaign yesterday.
RPM Radar, Ajans Ultra, Dentsu Brussels Group collaborated in the latest promotion campaign… Good and critical info here.
more about Istanbul follows:
Turkey and the EU: hurtful uncertainty | Şevket Pamuk | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Istanbul Metro Station, Taksim: Turkish Conquest of Constantinople. Photo by Jenny White
(click here for the full NY Times article). FOUND IN: Ottomania: The Empire Strikes Back
Dutch MPs cancel trip to Turkey | Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Turkish MPs are disappointed the Dutch parliament has cancelled a fact-finding mission about the country’s wishes to join the European Union, the NRC reports on Thursday.
Foresight analysis measures the potential impacts of foreign and domestic policy actions. For the purpose of writing this column I have chosen a number of Dutch and Turkish actors as part of a simulation exercise, and without meaning it to be derogatory in any way, have put them into a grid system of four adjacent boxes.
ASSETS
* Thanks to economic growth and tight fiscal policy, since the 2001 financial crisis, public sector debt has come down to manageable levels..
* Reforms and restructuring have strengthened the banking sector.
* Economic growth rests on more solid foundations, driven by a dynamic private sector, productivity gains, and higher value-added production.
* The prospect of economic convergence with the European Union, demographic dynamism, and the country’s pivotal regional position tend to enhance the Turkish market’s attractiveness.
WEAKNESSES
* With its extensive external financing needs, the highest of all emerging countries, Turkey remains very dependent on capital markets.
* The sharp rise of foreign currency debt in the private sector has increased its exposure to exchange rate risk.
* The antagonism between the government and militant Kemalists remains a recurring source of instability.
A nearly 12 square meter room for Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned PKK leader, caused uproar among PKK members. Ministry of Justice yesterday released photos of Öcalan’s cell which is nearly 1 m2 smaller than the previous one. More photos here.
Pro-PKK Kurds used Öcalan’s cell as a pretext to celebrate the anniversary of PKK’s establishment. There were riots in many cities and I provide some photos below. My first reaction is that this is a case of habitus. PKK members does not know any other way to continue. After 3 decades of fighting, Kurdish question has come to a new and positive level and with major parts’ contribution, we might witness historical moments. However, PKK reactions mostly serve Turkish nationalists…I do not claim AKP does all good but I am not sure if pro-PKK Kurds help the process at all.. but let me not forget to add. This is a friend’s idea. There are nearly no PKK leaders who can really handle the process. Most of reasonable PKK leaders like Musa Anter were assassinated by either hawkish Kurds or the State apparatus and now we have a different sort of leadership problem…
AFP: Turkey defends prison conditions of Kurdish leader
In a move likely to block the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government?s Kurdish initiative, which aims to expand the rights of the country?s Kurds, sympathizers of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers? Party (PKK) and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) are taking to the streets and resorting to violence in the cities.
