Washington Post (March 30)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s is facing his biggest threat in years. He has tried to stack the deck for his candidate in the Istanbul election, “but this ploy appears to have backfired. Some polls are predicting a serious loss for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its nationalist allies.”
Washington Post (October 14)
Trump’s reckless Middle East “ambitions have been revealed as the misguided fantasies they always were. The disappearance and alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul has exposed the real return on Trump’s gambits: a string of reckless acts by the Saudis and Israelis that have made the region more rather than less unstable.” Both Israel and Saudi Arabia “have exploited Trump’s indulgence to the hilt, taking actions they never would have dared under Obama or any other previous president.”
Tags: Ambitions, Consulate, Indulgence, Israelis, Istanbul, Journalist, Khashoggi, Middle East, Obama, Reckless, Saudi Arabia, Trump
New York Times (September 8)
“For the International Olympic Committee, environmental concerns in Japan appeared less urgent than the Syrian war on Turkey’s border, a harsh crackdown against antigovernment protesters recently in Istanbul and Spain’s economic recession and high unemployment…. Amid such economic, political and human rights maelstroms, Tokyo was seen as a calm harbor. It won handily over Istanbul in the second round of voting, 60-36, in a secret ballot of Olympic delegates.”
Tags: Environmental concerns, Human rights, IOC, Istanbul, Japan, Olympics, Recession, Spain, Syria, Tokyo, Turkey, Unemployment
