An economic crisis and high gas prices: it’s not a good combination in winter. Because, what do people do when their income goes down and the gas prices are higher than the price of coal? Exactly: they stop using gas and throw the dirty black stuff in the heater. Optimist that I am, I always […]
Istiklal Street in Istanbul is famous. It’s Istanbul’s main shopping street, also known for it’s countless bars, cinemas, historical buildings – and countless people: on the weekend, about 3 million people a day visit Istiklal. Being the thriving heart of this metropolis of 16 million people, this is also the place to be if you […]
I went to the Netherlands for a week, and even though I always intend to keep reading the Turkish papers online, I never really manage to do it: when you’re out of the country, somehow the news doesn’t get through your skull very well. Now that I am back, I’m catching up on the news […]
She thought she was dreaming. But then it turned out to be really happening: the guy sitting behind her in the night bus from Istanbul to a city in central Anatolia was touching her all over her body and grabbing her breasts. She screamed, cried and trembled, and she told her friend, who called the […]
ISTANBUL – The Turkish football club Diyarbakirspor, from the Kurdish southeast of Turkey, has withdrawn from the Turkish foot ball competition, after the club was once again deluged with anti-Kurdish slogans at an away-from-home game. Anti-Kurdish sentiments have been on the rise since the Turkish government took the initiative this summer to solve the problems […]
The Istanbul municipality recently started pulling down apartment blocks in the parts of town where heavy rain caused flooding and the deaths of 32 people last September. The apartment blocks were built in such a way that they blocked the natural run-off of rain to the Marmara Sea. By correcting these city planning mistakes, the […]
‘It’s okay, just throw it down’, I hear my love say to the guys who are putting new windows and window frames in the kitchen and living room and who are not sure what to do with the old frames and glass. I want to protest: Are you crazy, you can’t just throw things down […]
The surrender of a group of 34 men, women and children – some of them PKK members, some of them ordinary inhabitants of a refugee camp for Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq – was the first visible result of the government’s Kurdish initiative, launched this summer. By sending the ‘peace group’ (as the PKK calls […]
ISTANBUL (ANP) – A group of 34 men, women and children, some of them members of the Kurdish separatist movement PKK, have turned themselves in to Turkish authorities. This happened in the village of Silopi, near the Iraqi border. The surrender is seen as a sign that the PKK supports the initiative of the Turkish […]
Sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. I mean this country, the news. Like the fuss that started here this week about a new state TV series, Ayrılık (seperation), that is pretty anti-Israel. It’s just another ‘dizi’ (series) and in this one Israeli soldiers shoot little Palestinian girls in the heart. The anti-Israeli stance in […]