Sunday, October 31, 2010 

It's Halloween morning, and lots of frightening things are already taking place: in just a few minutes, the Detroit Lions take the field!

Now that, my friends, is scary! Ooh, it gives me goose pimples just thinking about it.

Happy Halloween everybody!!


Even Count Floyd gets scared sometimes by the ghoulish play of the Detroit Lions

And for the rest of you: here is your extra-special spooky Halloween     N & P:

Turkey

A suicide bomber detonated a bomb in Taksim Square in Istanbul on Sunday morning, killing him/herself and injuring more than thirty other people.
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Here is a pretty detailed piece on the Hrant Dink murder and investigation. Dink, of course, was the editor of an Armenian-language newspaper in Turkey who was shot to death in broad daylight more than three years ago. 

A seventeen year-old boy from the Black Sea region was arrested within two days of the murder, but many people have criticized the government's handling of the investigation.
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Now you're really scaring me: Turkish government imposing still more taxes on raki consumption


AKP taxes on alcohol consumption have brought on scary times for raki lovers in Turkey 
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Kamil Pasha is psyched that mandatory religious instruction in Turkey will now include not only Sunni Islam, but also other religions. 

Kamil Pasha believes this to be "a good change," presumably because it's more inclusive. But does this mean that all students, regardless of religion, will now have to attend religious classes in Turkish schools? As far as I know, non-Muslims had always been allowed to opt out of these classes. At the high school where I taught in the 1990s, there were two Jewish kids who would run out and play soccer while their classmates were forced to take Niyazi Bey's classes, which focused upon teaching his students how to pray. This was how it was in the schools where my friends taught, as well—only the Muslim students had to take this class.

But here I think is an even more important question: what kind of training in other religions will these  instructors receive? And what types of lessons about other religions are students in Turkey going to receive?  

Mandatory religious instruction was brought to Turkey after the coup of 1980. The generals running the country in the early 1980s considered communism to be the main threat to the country, and felt that greater attachment to Islam among the younger generation would depoliticize them. Today, however, many people in Turkey consider the mandating of this type of instruction as at least partly responsible for the politicization of religious issues that has taken place in the country in the decades which have followed.

So I wonder: does one have to be part of the "secular elite" in Turkey to oppose this sort of religious instruction altogether?
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US

Either laugh or cry department: David Broder sez war with Iran would "make the world safer" AND get the economy rolling again.
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Juan Cole has a very detailed piece on the bombs people tried to send to Chicago, and the role of the Saudi Arabian government in breaking up the plot. 

Police in Yemen have apparently already made an arrest in the case....

.....of, it seems, the wrong person.
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Rally to Restore Vanity: I liked Mark Ames' piece on the rally to restore sanity and/or fear, about which I wrote a bit yesterday.

Ames' is the only criticism of the rally that I thought has made any sense. Unlike clowns like Anne Applebaum (this is no laughing matter!) or that guy from Slate that NPR keeps quoting, Ames takes on the ralliers themselves, whom he despises, rather than Colbert or Stewart.

It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party  for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown–and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame–and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of.

Check out the rest of the piece here
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TL Squared, my friend: Hamid Karzai complains that joint US-Russia raid in Afghanistan violated Afghani sovereignty. 
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News flash courtesy of the New York Times: Reagan's war on drugs made marijuana way better
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Russia and ex-USSR

International Mayor of Mystery: 70% of Russians know absolutely nothing about Sergei Sobyanin. What about you?

He's the man Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has appointed mayor of Moscow.

Sobyanin replaces Yuri Luzhkov, who was fired earlier this month.

Ever since 2004, the position of mayor of Moscow has been an appointed, rather than elected, position. Vladimir Putin's response to the Breslan massacre of that year was to make the presidents of Russia's 21 republics (which exist wherever non-Russian populations are concentrated) appointed positions, rather than elected ones. The positions of mayor of Moscow and mayor of St. Petersburg were likewise transformed into appointed jobs, which is why the Kremlin was able to remove Luzhkov and replace him with Sobyanin. 

For background on the Luzkov firing, look here.


Moscow's new mayor is a virtual unknown in much of the country
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Leaders of Kyrgyzstan's four major parties travel to Moscow to discuss coalition building in aftermath of elections.
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Chechen President Kadyrov blames Georgia for supplying weapons to Chechen anti-government fighters, but Russian MP sez most weapons come from Russian soldiers
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Bad gas: Russia, Turkmenistan trade polemics over gas deal
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Armenian government ticked off at Joe Biden after Armenian-American secretly tapes conversation with Biden saying Armenian government asked US to take heat off Turkey and genocide recognition vote.

I have a video of Biden's comments in a post here.
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Now here's something really scary: multi-billion dollar contracts in Kyrgyzstan cloaked in secrecy
 
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Boo!