Friday, November 5, 2010 

Updated: 1:37 pm, Bozeman time

These are busy times up at the Borderlands Lodge. The weather has been extraordinary, which has not helped. This time last year there was snow on the ground—snow that would not go away until the following May. Now, however, it's just bright blue skies and sunshine. This is great—but with so much work to do, it's also a bit of a distraction.

But before getting too distracted, I thought I'd send a little N & P your way:


Russia and ex-USSR

Police bust up rally in St. Petersburg. Here is an article in Foreign Policy discussing the splits in the anti-Putin opposition in Russia. 
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Moscow News talks about National Unity Day, the latest in a series of holiday changes that have taken place in Russia over the past couple of decades.
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Russian policy "unchanged" since imperial times: the Jamestown Spooks publish another Russophobic neo-con piece about the northern Caucasus.
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Obama administration sez recent Ukrainian elections "do not meet standards for openness and fairness."

Meanwhile, tensions appear to be rising in Kharkov, in eastern Ukraine, over disputed election results
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Azerbaijan: taking aim at the media. I guess this contrasts with the recent observation by the Jamestown Spooks that "Azerbaijan’s perceived willingness to hold the next parliamentary elections in an open, transparent and democratic atmosphere has attracted an unprecedented level of international attention for this rapidly evolving, young democracy with one of the fastest growing economies in the world."
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US

Heckuva job: true cost of Iraq war more than three trillion dollars.

Everybody, it seems, has different estimates of what the war cost, and in this study even things like the higher cost of oil were included. 

But nevertheless it's eye-opening the extent to which supposed fiscal hawks still defend the decision to go to war. Not that the expense has been the war's main, or most important, legacy. Not by any means.
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Motown grieves: beloved baseball icon Sparky Manager has passed away


Sparky was old school before school was even old

Turkey & SE Europe

That didn't take long: just two days after YouTube was un-banned in Turkey, it's back offline. Alert readers will remember that this is exactly what I predicted would happen.

After all, YouTube hadn't been brought back to Turkey because the Turkish government had changed its policies about banning websites that offend the legacy of Ataturk (or a bunch of other things—more than 5000 websites are banned in Turkey in addition to YouTube). Rather, YouTube had taken the offending videos down, which had cleared the way for the Turkish government to end its 2.5 year ban. So all people need to do in order to make the Turkish government look primitive and stupid is to re-post offending videos, and again the site is taken down.

Which, of course, is precisely what happened.
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Turkish authorities have identified the man who set off a suicide bomb in Taksim Square on Sunday, injuring more than thirty people.

According to Turkish police, the bomber had ties with the PKK. The PKK, however, had already denied having a connection to the bombing. 

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Wrath of the maganda: Zaman newspaper, a favorite source of English-language information for some bloggers writing on Turkey, is scandalized by a cartoon exhibition set up by the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) which dares ridicule Turkey's president, prime minister, and other Zaman favorites.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has come up with yet another scandalous act, ridiculing and defaming President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and various ministers at a cartoon exhibition organized at its headquarters.

And Erdogan, apparently, is pissed.

Not a surprise, given the man's thin-skinned response to ridicule on other occasions. Erdogan frequently sued former CHP opposition leader Deniz Baykal for character defamation, most notably after Baykal intimated that Erdogan was a maganda. And what better way to prove to the world that you're not a maganda than to take a man to court for calling you one!

Other sources indicate that Erdogan has sued cartoonists on literally dozens of occasions since taking office in 2003.

Here's something more recent on press freedom in Turkey and the AKP
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Are we cool?: Serbian president visits Vukovar, site of 90s war crimes, sez it's time to move on
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Hurriyet is reporting that Turkish schools should impart faith in God to students, sez AKP-dominated national educational advisory commission in Turkey.

The other day I wrote about the AKP and religion in the public sphere—the promotion of which in Turkey which often seems to be championed by foreign observers of Turkey concerned about freedom of religious expression.

The commission also seems interested in finding a way to re-integrate imam-hatip schools into the rest of the country's educational infrastructure. For years, students could attend imam-hatip schools for several years, then switch schools in order to graduate from a secular institution and attend university (although at the time, even imam-hatip graduates could apply to any university department). This system was changed in the late 1990s, when 8-year uninterrupted education became the law in Turkey, which meant that students spent all of their time at either a secular school or an imam-hatip school.

The commission appears interested in changing this, too, allowing imam-hatip students to switch into secular schools after receiving religious training for several years. 
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Allen Iverson begins his Turkish basketball career this week—on Saturday against cross-town rival Fenerbahce. Here's a video of some of his comments at a press conference regarding the move.



He seems pretty bummed out about things, to be honest with you. I even got a little choked up listening to him say, with absolutely no conviction in his voice, that he thinks he's doing the right thing even though he's moving away from all of his friends.

I know a thing or two about starting over in a foreign environment, and I can tell you it's not always easy—especially as you get older. Fortunately for Allen, however, it's easy to make friends in Turkey.


Mahir sez "I kiss you, Allen!"

I hope you enjoyed your N & P!