The football part of the match between Turkey and Armenia is totally uninteresting: both countries have already failed to qualify for the world championships in South Africa. But still, the tension is rising in Bursa, the city not too far from Istanbul where the match will be played tonight. The Armenian President Sarkisyan will come […]
ISTANBUL –As part of a Turkish government campaign, a number of pregnant women were accidentally vaccinated against rubella. The vaccination can cause serious deformations to the unborn child, which led sixty women to have an abortion, according to today’s daily newspaper Hürriyet and local paper Ege’de Son Söz. It is also possible that pregnant women […]
ISTANBUL – Eighteen thousand legal taxis and at least twenty-five thousand illegal ones: Istanbul taxi drivers protested today against their unlicensed colleagues. Their most important demand was more severe punishments for illegal drivers. However, many Instanbul residents think that the licensed cabbies should first try a bit of introspection. It’s the first time that taxi […]
I wished for it to exist, but I thought it didn’t. Whenever I went to a beach, there would be some ‘beach club’ where very loud boom boom boom music was played and there would be people on the beach with their private stereo sound system playing something else, also loud. I admit that I […]
ISTANBUL – The closure of several internet forums for gays is another example of homophobia and a new step towards silencing gay organisations in Turkey. That’s the view of spokespersons for huge gay forums that were closed this week on the order of a government organisation. The sites seem to have been closed because of […]
And once again the governing AKP shows it doesn’t like alcohol: a well known municipal fish restaurant on the Anatolian side of the Bosporus has decided to no longer serve alcohol. The municipality of that part of town has a new AKP mayor, and he made the decision that is all over the newspapers at […]
The fight between Kurdish seperatist movement PKK and the Turkish army was at its dirtiest in the nineteen-nineties. Hundreds of (alleged) PKK sympathisers were killed or disappeared without a trace. Who was responsible? It was thought “Jitem”, a secret anti-terrorism unit of the military police. The bodies were dumped in wells, fields and rivers. Now […]
What I like about being in ‘the village’ in Kapadokya in central Anatolia are the seasons that are defined by which kind of crop is in the center of everyday life. At the end of september, it’s grapes (and pumpkins): they are ripe and being harvested. In the streets there are horse carts with wooden […]
So bayram, as they call the holidays here, is over. Three days of eating, kissing hands and visits to family and friends, people seem to love it but I’m happy I’m not really part of it. The children are rather generous with kissing the hands of their parents, aunts and uncles, adult brothers and sisters, […]
Network site myspace.com has been closed down in Turkey. It’s not totally clear yet why, but it’s said it has to do with copyright laws being infringed. On myspace, a lot of music is shared among members, and it’s of course feasible that in the process copyrights are not always respected. Which is illegal, but […]