Category Archives: Lands

Despite talk of a military strike, Trump’s ‘armada’ actually sailed away from Korea

The Washington Post reports: As tensions mounted on the Korean Peninsula, Adm. Harry Harris made a dramatic announcement: An aircraft carrier had been ordered to sail north from Singapore on April 8 toward the Western Pacific.

A spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, which Harris heads, linked the deployment directly to the “number one threat in the region,” North Korea, and its “reckless, irresponsible and destabilizing program of missile tests and pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters on April 11 that the Carl Vinson was “on her way up there.” Asked about the deployment in an interview with Fox Business Network that aired April 12, President Trump said: “We are sending an armada, very powerful.”

U.S. media went into overdrive, and Fox reported on April 14 that the armada was “steaming” toward North Korea.

But pictures posted by the U.S. Navy suggest that’s not quite the case — or at least not yet.

A photograph released by the Navy showed the aircraft carrier sailing through the calm waters of Sunda Strait between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java on Saturday, April 15. By later in the day, it was in the Indian Ocean, according to Navy photographs.

In other words, on the same day that the world nervously watched North Korea stage a massive military parade to celebrate the birthday of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung, and the press speculated about a preemptive U.S. strike, the U.S. Navy put the Carl Vinson, together with its escort of two guided-missile destroyers and a cruiser, more than 3,000 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula — and more than 500 miles southeast of Singapore. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian refugees choose Turkey

Charles Simpson, Zeynep Balcioglu, and Abdullah Almutabagani, write: At first glance, the March 2016 EU–Turkey deal, which gives visa-free travel and 3 billion Euros ($3.3 billion) in relief aid to Turkey if it stems the flow of refugees to Europe, seems to have worked. Turkey now hosts three times the number of Syrian refugees as all of Europe, and according to data from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), there has been a dramatic drop in the number of refugees moving from Turkey to Greece since the deal was enacted. However, for many refugees, the real reason behind the decrease in refugee flows into Europe lies in their own widespread preference to remain in Turkey, where they perceive a better life is possible.

Earlier statistical analysis by Oxford University researchers found the drop in migration predated the EU-Turkey deal and therefore could not be causally connected. A series of interviews with Syrian refugees confirm this trend, indicating most refugees interviewed wanted to stay in Turkey and were using their socioeconomic resources to facilitate integration. Many of those who did travel to Europe found life there was not necessarily the paradise they anticipated and in many cases communicated back to Syrians in Turkey that the journey’s risk was not worth the reward.

Those refugees in Turkey with the resources to do so are buying homes, learning Turkish, starting businesses, enrolling in schools, and forming communities. They face a range of obstacles, including health service inadequacies, a language barrier, and racism. Not all refugees in Turkish cities are lucky: while many refugees in Turkey have found informal work, most are underemployed, underpaid, and have a difficult time finding jobs that meet their qualifications or educational level. Still, most of those interviewed—even those who had lived in Europe or had close relatives living there—reported a preference for life in Turkey over Europe. Turkey offers them looser enforcement of employment regulation, more established Syrian communities, a familiar religion and culture, and geographic proximity to Syria that gives hope for return. Three communities are particularly illustrative of the appeal Turkey holds: Fatih and Sultanbeyli in Istanbul, and Manisa near Izmir. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. attack on the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque near Aleppo

Human Rights Watch reports: Just before 7 p.m. on March 16, 2017, US aircraft attacked the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque near al-Jinah, a village in Aleppo province in northern Syria, where about 300 people had gathered for religious lectures and the Muslim Isha’a, or night prayer. The attack completely destroyed the service section of the mosque and killed at least 38 people.

US military authorities have acknowledged that they carried out the strike, saying that they targeted a meeting of al-Qaeda members. A US military spokesperson said that the US military carried out extensive surveillance before the attack and that they take “extraordinary measures to mitigate the loss of civilian life” in such operations. However, Human Rights Watch research suggests that US authorities failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian casualties in the attack, a requirement under the laws of war.

While US officials acknowledged that there was a mosque nearby, they claimed that the targeted building was a partially constructed community hall. But information from local residents, photographs, and video footage of the building before and after the attack show that the targeted building was also a mosque. While the mosque did not have a minaret or a dome that would have been visible by aerial surveillance, local residents said that dozens, if not hundreds, of people were gathering in the building at prayer times. Aerial surveillance of the building should have shown this. Local residents also said that the mosque was well known and widely used by people in the area. Any attempt to verify through people with local knowledge what kind of building this was would have likely established that the building was a mosque. [Continue reading…]

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Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet

Bill McKibben writes: Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau.

Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over.

But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington.

Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F).

But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.

Last month, speaking at a Houston petroleum industry gathering, he got a standing ovation from the oilmen for saying: “No country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

Yes, 173bn barrels is indeed the estimate for recoverable oil in the tar sands. So let’s do some math. If Canada digs up that oil and sells it to people to burn, it will produce, according to the math whizzes at Oil Change International, 30% of the carbon necessary to take us past the 1.5C target that Canada helped set in Paris.

That is to say, Canada, which represents one half of 1% of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget. Trump is a creep and a danger and unpleasant to look at, but at least he’s not a stunning hypocrite. [Continue reading…]

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Liberté, égalité, fraternité, racisme?

Ursula Lindsey writes: France will head to the polls at the end of April to elect a new president. With the country still shaken by recent terrorist attacks, and the rise of a far-right candidate who has campaigned on fear of Muslims and immigrants, public discourse has been dominated by a concern with Islam and radicalization.

The often acrimonious discussion has widened a rift among many public intellectuals and scholars, including those you might expect to be allies. The argument: whether the more serious threat to liberal values in France is the alleged Islamization of the country or the discrimination that many Muslims there face.

Georges Bensoussan, a historian and chief editor of the Shoah History Review, is a divisive figure in the debate. In October 2015, Bensoussan said during a radio show that “today we are in the presence of another people within the French nation, who are making a certain number of our democratic values regress. … There will be no integration until we rid ourselves of this atavistic anti-Semitism that is kept quiet as a secret. A courageous Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher has said … that it’s shameful to maintain this taboo, which is that in Arab families in France, one suckles anti-Semitism like mother’s milk.”

Laacher, who is French of Algerian origin, teaches at the University of Strasbourg. He has said he was misquoted. Bensoussan’s remarks triggered a lawsuit by the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and other human-rights associations for “incitement to racism.” He was acquitted in March, but the plaintiffs have filed an appeal. [Continue reading…]

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Behind North Korea’s fizzled missile: Has China lost control of Kim?

Gordon G Chang writes: The quick end to Sunday’s test undercuts the fearsome image of his ballistic missiles. “The timing was a deep embarrassment for the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un,” the New York Times wrote Saturday, referring to the explosion soon after the launch.

That is not, in fact, good news. What does a deeply embarrassed dictator do next? He tests another missile or detonates a nuclear device to end his country’s celebrations on what he considers a high note. Kim has plenty of missiles, and his technicians look like they have buried, in preparation for a detonation, a nuke at the Punggye-ri site in northeastern North Korea.

Or maybe he does something else provocative.

Kim may have to do something we consider horrible if he wants to remain in power. His rule looks increasingly unstable—since the end of January there have been various incidents suggesting trouble at the top of the regime—so a humiliating episode like the almost-immediate failure of the missile Sunday could tip him over the edge.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a weak dictator who commands the world’s most destructive weapons. Friday, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report stating that Kim may have had up to 30 nukes at the end of 2016 and the industrial infrastructure to build more at a fast clip.

And Kim also looks defiant. Washington has been issuing warnings to the North Korean leader in the days leading up to the “Day of the Sun” celebration Saturday, and so has Beijing. The missile test suggests, among other things, that Kim feels he can ignore the stern Chinese lectures delivered through various means, including the Global Times. The nationalist tabloid, controlled by People’s Daily, this week threatened restricting the flow of oil to Kim, among other measures.

If Kim in fact thinks he can safely defy Beijing, Kim may at this point be, as a practical matter, uncontrollable. [Continue reading…]

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Face-to-face with top North Korean diplomat

John Sudworth, after interviewing North Korea’s Vice-Foreign Minister Han Song-ryol, writes: Donald Trump’s recent ordering of the airstrike on a Syrian airbase has clearly rattled Pyongyang and the threat now is not simply of retaliation to an attack, but even, Mr Han suggests, to the planning of one.

“If the USA encroaches upon our sovereignty then it will provoke our immediate counter reaction and if it is planning a military attack against us, we will react with a nuclear pre-emptive strike by our own style and method.”

However, despite the posturing on both sides, the risks, most observers agree, are still limited.

For the US and its allies, war carries incalculable risks and although Washington insists that all options are on the table, it now appears to be signalling that diplomacy and toughened sanctions are the most likely way forward.

It is as yet unclear how, having failed before, those things will force this most totalitarian of states to give up its nuclear weapons.

As Vice-Foreign Minister Han made clear to me, North Korea has learned the lessons from recent history, in particular the US-led attempts at regime change in Iraq and Libya.

“If the balance of power is not there, then the outbreak of war is imminent and unavoidable.”

“If one side has nukes and the other side doesn’t, and they’re on bad terms, war will inevitably break out,” he said.

“This is the lesson shown by the reality of the countries in the Middle East, including Libya and Syria where people are suffering from great misfortune.” [Continue reading…]

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China’s Korea policy ‘in tatters’ as both North and South defy sanctions

The Washington Post reports: More than half a century ago, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops died in the Korean War, fighting on the side of their communist allies in the North against the U.S.-backed South. Yet today, China finds itself in the uncomfortable position of falling out with both sides on the Korean Peninsula.

On Monday, South Korea announced that it would press ahead with the “swift deployment” of a U.S. missile defense system despite vociferous Chinese opposition.

In February, China said it was cutting off coal imports from North Korea in accordance with sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council in a bid to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear and missile program. On Sunday, North Korea ignored China’s pleas not to raise regional tensions by conducting another missile test, albeit one that failed.

China has also imposed unofficial and unilateral sanctions against South Korea to persuade it not to deploy the missile defense system, experts say. On Monday, as Vice President Pence warned North Korea not to test U.S. resolve, South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, vowed to rapidly deploy that system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

“Even before the United States upped the tempo, China was in the unusual position of having really very bad relations with both the North and the South — that’s something of an accomplishment,” said Euan Graham, director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “Its peninsula policy was in tatters, and things have only got worse since.”

China is not alone in struggling to construct a successful policy toward North Korea, as the United States can attest. But the failure of its approach has seldom been more starkly outlined, as Pyongyang presses ahead with its nuclear program, the United States sends an aircraft carrier strike group to the region and fears of military conflict mount, analysts say.

Beijing and Washington share the same goal — a peninsula free of nuclear weapons — but they often appear to be trying to realize that goal in mutually incompatible ways.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States tried to isolate and pressure North Korea economically, an approach that China argues has raised tensions and forced its leader, Kim Jong Un — and his father before him — into a corner.

China had banked on a different approach, believing that building up North Korea’s economy would gradually bring about more moderate politics. That policy, though, has simply given North Korea the resources and the technology to build up its nuclear and missile programs, experts say. [Continue reading…]

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The many times Theresa May ruled out an early election

The Guardian reports: Before the surprise announcement that she would be going to the polls on 8 June, Theresa May had repeatedly ruled out calling a snap general election.

Just before she assumed the role of prime minister, she said there would be no early election under her leadership. On 30 June, in the speech that launched her bid, she explicitly ruled it out.

Then in her first major interview after taking office she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show last September that the UK needed a period of stability after the shock Brexit vote.

She said: “I’m not going to be calling a snap election. I’ve been very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability, to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Nicola Sturgeon has accused Theresa May of using the snap general election as a chance to “move the UK to the right” and force through deeper spending cuts.

Sturgeon said the prime minister’s decision was a “huge political miscalculation” because it would give voters a fresh chance to reject Conservative austerity and a hard Brexit, and give the Scottish National party a new mandate for an independence referendum.

“She is clearly betting that the Tories can win a bigger majority in England given the utter disarray in the Labour party,” she said.

“That makes it all the important that Scotland is protected from a Tory party which now sees the chance of grabbing control of government for many years to come and moving the UK further to the right – forcing through a hard Brexit and imposing deeper cuts in the process.

“That means that this will be – more than ever before – an election about standing up for Scotland in the face of a rightwing, austerity-obsessed Tory government with no mandate in Scotland but which now thinks it can do whatever it wants and get away with it.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump calls Erdogan to congratulate him on contested referendum, Turkey says

The Washington Post reports: President Trump called to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday after a referendum greatly expanding his powers, according to Turkish officials, despite a more circumspect State Department response to Sunday’s vote, which international election observers declared unfair.

Erdogan’s office said that he and Trump also discussed the situation in Syria, including the April 4 chemical weapons attack on civilians in Idlib province, and that Trump thanked Erdogan for Turkey’s support.

“The two leaders agreed that Bashar al-Assad should be held accountable for the actions he has taken,” said a statement from Erdogan’s office, referring to Syria’s president.

The White House confirmed that the two leaders had spoken, but would not describe the call.

As described by a Turkish statement, Trump’s comments differed in tone from those of the State Department, which urged Turkey to respect the basic rights of its citizens and noted the election irregularities witnessed by monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The United States is a member of the OSCE. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s North Korea sabre-rattling has a flaw: Kim Jong-un has nothing to lose

The Guardian reports: In the lead-up to North Korea’s latest missile test, Donald Trump had battled to convince Kim Jong-un he was picking a fight with the wrong guy.

The US president pounded Syria with 59 Tomahawk missiles and then ordered a naval “armada” into the waters around the Korean peninsula. He dropped the “mother of all bombs” on eastern Afghanistan and used Twitter to hammer home his message.

“North Korea is looking for trouble,” the US president tweeted last week as Kim’s technicians made the final preparations for Sunday’s botched but nevertheless defiant test.

But experts say Pyongyang’s latest act has underlined the futility of the billionaire’s efforts to bully Kim Jong-un into abandoning his nuclear ambitions.

“There is a problem with playing the military threat [card] with North Korea because they are inclined to call the bluff,” said John Delury, a North Korea expert from Yonsei University in Seoul. “I’m not saying they tested because of the threats. But bringing a naval strike group doesn’t help if your goal is to put off a test. If anything you are increasing the odds.” [Continue reading…]

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North Korea warns ‘thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’

The Associated Press reports: A senior North Korean official has accused the US of turning the Korean peninsula into “the world’s biggest hotspot” and creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment”.

North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador, Kim In-ryong, described US-South Korean military exercises as the largest ever “aggressive war drill” and said his country was “ready to react to any mode of war desired by the US”.

The country’s deputy foreign minister, Han Song-Ryol, told the BBC that Pyongyang would continue to test missiles “on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis”. All-out war would ensue if the US took military action, he said..

The statements from the North Korean officials came as the US president, Donald Trump, told the government in Pyongyang that it has “gotta behave” and his vice-president, Mike Pence, said the “era of strategic patience is over”. [Continue reading…]

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Russian state TV says Trump is more dangerous than Kim Jong-un

Bloomberg reports: Russian state television has no doubt who is unpredictable enough to bring the world to war in the North Korean crisis, and it’s not the reclusive communist dictator Kim Jong-Un.

According to Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s top TV mouthpiece, the riskiest is Donald Trump, the man Russian officials and propagandists hailed just a few weeks ago as just the kind of leader the world needed.

In the latest sign of the Kremlin’s abrupt about-face on its erstwhile American hero, Kiselyov pronounced Trump “more dangerous” than his North Korean counterpart. “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong Un,” he told viewers of his prime-time Sunday “Vesti Nedelyi” program, which earlier this year carried paeans to Trump for his pledge to warm up relations with Russia.

Kiselyov and his colleagues on other channels also went after Trump’s family, noting that Kim hadn’t given his four-year-old daughter an office in his residence, in contrast to Trump’s appointment of his 35-year-old daughter, Ivanka, to a White House role. [Continue reading…]

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How Soviet dissidents ended 70 years of fake news

Gal Beckerman writes: In the summer of 1990, at a fulcrum moment when his country was tipping from reform to dissolution, Mikhail S. Gorbachev spoke to Time magazine and declared, “I detest lies.” It was a revolutionary statement only because it came from the mouth of a Soviet leader.

On the surface, he was simply embracing his own policy of glasnost, the new openness introduced alongside perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet Union’s command economy that was meant to rescue the country from geopolitical free-fall. Mr. Gorbachev was wagering that truthful and unfettered expression — a press able to criticize and investigate, history books without redacted names, and honest, accountable government — just might save the creaking edifice of Communist rule.

For the Soviet leader, glasnost was “a blowtorch that could strip the layers of old and peeling paint from Soviet society,” wrote the Baltimore Sun’s Moscow correspondent (and now Times reporter) Scott Shane in “Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union.” “But the Communist system proved dry tinder.”

We in the West have always praised Mr. Gorbachev for his courage in taking this gamble — even though he lost an empire in the process — but he did it under pressure. The idea that a better relationship with facts might be liberating for a corrupt and ailing Soviet Union was not new. Mr. Gorbachev was echoing and appropriating the arguments of a dissident movement that, for decades, had made an insistence on truth its essential form of resistance.

If the Soviet Union was the 20th century’s greatest example of a regime that used propaganda and information to control and contain its citizens — 70 years of fake news! — the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution is an important moment to appreciate how it also produced a powerful countercurrent in the civil society undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan has permanently closed a chapter of Turkey’s modern history

Steven A Cook writes: On Jan. 20, 1921, the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed the Teşkilât-ı Esasîye Kanunu, or the Law on Fundamental Organization. It would be almost three years until Mustafa Kemal — known more commonly as Ataturk, or “Father Turk” — proclaimed the Republic of Turkey, but the legislation was a critical marker of the new order taking shape in Anatolia.

The new country called Turkey, quite unlike the Ottoman Empire, was structured along modern lines. It was to be administered by executive and legislative branches, as well as a Council of Ministers composed of elected representatives of the parliament. What had once been the authority of the sultan, who ruled alone with political and ecclesiastic legitimacy, was placed in the hands of legislators who represented the sovereignty of the people.

More than any other reform, the Law on Fundamental Organization represented a path from dynastic rule to the modern era. And it was this change that was at stake in Turkey’s referendum over the weekend. Much of the attention on Sunday’s vote was focused on the fact that it was a referendum on the power of the Turkish presidency and the polarizing politician who occupies that office, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet it was actually much more.

Whether they understood it or not, when Turks voted “Yes”, they were registering their opposition to the Teşkilât-ı Esasîye Kanunu and the version of modernity that Ataturk imagined and represented. Though the opposition is still disputing the final vote tallies, the Turkish public seems to have given Erdogan and the AKP license to reorganize the Turkish state and in the process raze the values on which it was built. Even if they are demoralized in their defeat, Erdogan’s project will arouse significant resistance among the various “No” camps. The predictable result will be the continuation of the purge that has been going on since even before last July’s failed coup including more arrests and the additional delegitimization of Erdogan’s parliamentary opposition. All of this will further destabilize Turkish politics.

Turkey’s Islamists have long venerated the Ottoman period. In doing so, they implicitly expressed thinly veiled contempt for the Turkish Republic. For Necmettin Erbakan, who led the movement from the late 1960s to the emergence of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in August 2001, the republic represented cultural abnegation and repressive secularism in service of what he believed was Ataturk’s misbegotten ideas that the country could be made Western and the West would accept it. Rather, he saw Turkey’s natural place not at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels but as a leader of the Muslim world, whose partners should be Pakistan, Malaysia, Egypt, Iran, and Indonesia.

When Erbakan’s protégés — among them Erdogan and former President Abdullah Gul — broke with him and created the AKP, they jettisoned the anti-Western rhetoric of the old guard, committed themselves to advancing Turkey’s European Union candidacy, and consciously crafted an image of themselves as the Muslim analogues to Europe’s Christian Democrats. Even so, they retained traditional Islamist ideas about the role of Turkey in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.

Thinkers within the AKP — notably former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu — harbored reservations about the compatibility of Western political and social institutions with their predominantly Muslim society. But the AKP leadership never acted upon this idea, choosing instead to undermine aspects of Ataturk’s legacy within the framework of the republic. That is no longer the case.

The AKP and supporters of the “yes” vote argue that the criticism of the constitutional amendments was unfair. They point out that the changes do not undermine a popularly elected parliament and president as well as an independent (at least formally) judiciary. This is all true, but it is also an exceedingly narrow description of the political system that Erdogan envisions. Rather, the powers that would be afforded to the executive presidency are vast, including the ability to appoint judges without input from parliament, issue decrees with the force of law, and dissolve parliament. The president would also have the sole prerogative over all senior appointments in the bureaucracy and exercise exclusive control of the armed forces. The amendments obviate the need for the post of prime minister, which would be abolished. The Grand National Assembly does retain some oversight and legislative powers, but if the president and the majority are from the same political party, the power of the presidency will be unconstrained. With massive imbalances and virtually no checks on the head of state, who will now also be the head of government, the constitutional amendments render the Law on Fundamental Organization and all subsequent efforts to emulate the organizational principles of a modern state moot. It turns out that Erdogan, who would wield power not vested in Turkish leaders since the sultans, is actually a neo-Ottoman. [Continue reading…]

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With few options, U.S. doesn’t rule out talks with North Korea

The New York Times reports: North Korea may have refrained from detonating a nuclear device and botched another missile test this weekend, easing tensions in Asia. But it is unclear whether President Trump has found a way around the limited options against North Korea that constrained his predecessors and put it on the path to becoming a nuclear power.

Mr. Trump essentially has three choices: a military strike that could ignite a full-blown war; pressure on China to impose tougher sanctions to persuade the North to change course, an approach that failed for his predecessors; or a deal that could require significant concessions, with no guarantee that North Korea would fulfill its promises.

Thus far, Mr. Trump has tried to signal both resolve and ambiguity, suggesting at various times that he is open to all three options. The question is whether his apparent willingness to consider both war and a deal may be enough carrot and stick to persuade China to change its approach and apply enough pressure to bring the North to the table.

Vice President Mike Pence, during a visit to South Korea, raised the possibility on Monday that the Trump administration could pursue talks. No one should mistake the resolve of the United States, he said, also noting that Washington was seeking security “through peaceable means, through negotiations.” The phrasing was unusual for a senior American official discussing the Korean Peninsula with American troops in the background.

Talks have long been China’s preference, and now that Mr. Trump seems to be relying on Beijing to an unprecedented degree, Mr. Pence may have been signaling that the United States was open to negotiations. China’s chief objective is to get talks — of any kind — started to avoid conflict so close to home. [Continue reading…]

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After referendum, Turkey is more divided than ever

The Guardian reports: The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has claimed victory in a historic referendum on a package of constitutional amendments that will grant him sweeping new powers.

However, disparities persisted into Sunday evening, with the opposition saying not all ballots had been counted and they would contest a third of the votes that had been cast.

If confirmed, the result of the referendum will set the stage for a transformation of the upper echelons of the state and change the country from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential republic, arguably the most important development in the country’s history since it was founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Republic.

Erdogan said he would immediately discuss reinstating the death penalty in talks with the prime minister and the nationalist opposition leader, Devlet Bahceli. The president said he would take the issue to referendum if necessary. [Continue reading…]

Simon Waldman writes: One rule of thumb in a healthy referendum is that the voting public should be asked a clear and concise question with a simple yes or no answer.

On Sunday, when 55 million eligible Turkish voters went to the polls in a nationwide referendum about constitutional changes that would effectively transform Turkey’s parliamentary system to an executive presidency, there was no question on the ballot. There was just a paper slip with the option Yes or No.

The Yes camp of current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared victory – albeit a very narrow one.

The lack of a question on the ballot is just one example of the deficiencies, irregularities and misconduct during the whole process. Meanwhile, the manner in which the election took place was grossly unfair.

Since the failed military coup of July last year, Turkey remains under an extended state of emergency. Not only did this allow Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party government to purge hundreds of thousands of civil servants from the state bureaucracy, but it also hurt the No campaign. It allowed the government to ban public rallies at a whim and make an emergency decree to allow private broadcasters to disproportionately air Yes campaign material without penalty.

The naysayers had no chance; they were playing with loaded dice. [Continue reading…]

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Trump ‘will take action’ to end any North Korea threat to U.S. says national security adviser

ABC News reports: Hours after North Korea paraded its weaponry and attempted a missile launch, President Trump’s national security adviser said the U.S. leader will not allow Kim Jong Un’s regime to have the capacity to threaten the U.S.

“While it’s unclear and we do not want to telegraph in any way how we’ll respond to certain incidents, it’s clear that the president is determined not to allow this kind of capability to threaten the United States,” Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz in an exclusive interview on “This Week” Sunday. “Our president will take action that is in the best interest of the American people.”

North Korea rolled out ballistic missiles and other weaponry at a huge parade Saturday and later in the day, at 5:21 p.m. ET, made a failed attempt to shoot off a missile, which exploded immediately after launch.

McMaster said the launch “fits a pattern of provocative and destabilizing and threatening behavior on the part of the North Korean regime.”

“I think there’s an international consensus now, including the Chinese and the Chinese leadership, that this is a situation that just can’t continue. And the president has made clear that he will not accept the United States and its allies and partners in the region being under threat from this hostile regime with nuclear weapons,” said McMaster, who spoke from Kabul, Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

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