NEWS

PRESS Cumhuriyet defies Erdoğan in statement: We are all responsible

Cumhuriyet newspaper staff and writers have published a declaration in reaction to President Tayyip Erdoğan’s words, “This newspaper too is now part of the spying scheme. The person who wrote this report will pay dearly for it, he won’t get away with it so easily,” targeting their Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar after their newspaper published a report on a delivery of Syria-bound arms in MİT [National Intelligence Service] trucks.
AGENDA An AK Party fetish disguised as the Conquest of Istanbul

I should have guessed we had to walk a kilometer once I heard an attendant repeat every five seconds, “The rally venue is 100 metres ahead, on the left”. You would think we were re-conquering the city, as we walked on and on but felt like we were in the same place. In the meantime, I observed the middle-aged men, whose commercial acumen I greatly admired, selling scarves, caps, sandwiches, bottled water, flags and plaques.
TURKEY Akbank approves SOCAR loan for ‘prime’ project

The 212 million dollar Akbank loan for SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijani Republic, for the container port project in Aliağa, İzmir, was approved on May 25. The project land was transferred to SOCAR with a ‘preferential’ clause added to the omnibus bill.
AGENDA Yetvart Danzikyan: Davutoğlu’s Diaspora journey

100 years later, we would have loved to think that certain things have changed in these lands; however, we can’t. It is not easy to tolerate seeing what people will do for power, and how the smile on a face can, in a flash, change into an evil grin; but we will.
TURKEY Davutoğlu’s transformation: From ‘The Diaspora is our Diaspora’ to ‘Those who claim a right over our lands’

Prime Minister Davutoğlu, in a television interview, implying HDP co-President Selahattin Demirtaş, said, “I wonder what bargains he has made that led him to sabotage the Solution Process upon his return to Turkey, I wonder what bargains he has made that he is acting in tandem with the Armenian Diaspora that claims a right over the lands on which the Solution Process focuses”. Yet it was only three months ago that the same Prime Minister had said, “The Diaspora is our Diaspora”.
TURKEY Interior Ministry strikes further blow to academic freedom

Interior Ministry permission has been imposed on any academic research on Syrian refugees to be carried out at universities. The Higher Education Council (YÖK) decision was taken upon the request of the Migration Administration Department of the Interior Ministry.
AGENDA Demirtaş: Our one and only answer to provocations is peace

HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş spoke at a rally in Mersin that went ahead in defiance of the synchronized bomb attacks on his party’s bureaus in Mersin and Adana: ‘We will approach other political parties with feelings of fraternity in order to render this provocation void’