Turkey

Friday

Cockburn

Eric Adams’s Turkey trot

“Brooklyn is the Istanbul of America,” now-Mayor Eric Adams told a pair of Turks on camera after they asked him for political favors in a cameo he made in a Turkish romcom. Now, in real life, Adams is accused of doing just that, following a sweeping indictment unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan who allege that he fraudulently obtained $10 million in public campaign funds and accepted over $100,000 in bribes in order to facilitate a new Turkish consulate.“In 2014, Eric Adams, the defendant, became Brooklyn borough president.

Thursday

Cockburn

New York mayor Eric Adams indicted on federal charges

Talk about making history: New York City mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a federal grand jury, the first sitting NYC mayor to face a federal charge while in post. Adams, who has served as mayor for three years, has been the subject of a federal investigation into whether his campaign was on the receiving end of illegal foreign donations from the Turkish government. New York is currently hosting the annual United Nations General Assembly; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's president, left the city hours before Adams's indictment. The indictment itself remains sealed, with more details expected to be revealed later today. Adams previously served as Brooklyn borough president and was an officer in New York City police forces for two decades.

eric adams

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Oblique and long but never boring: About Dry Grasses reviewed

From our UK edition

About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought to myself as the lights dimmed – have a great deal to say about dry grasses that is fascinating and insightful, given it has a formidable running time of 200 minutes. (That’s nearly three and a half hours in old money.) It is, needless to say – with a title like that, few will mistake it for a Marvel flick – one of those films where the story unfolds obliquely and meditatively and may say everything or nothing, it’s hard to know. All I can tell you for sure is that I wasn’t ever bored even if dry grass doesn’t make an appearance until three hours and nine minutes in. A spoiler, yes, but best to be clear, so you don’t complain later.

Sunday

Sara Wheeler

Pat Yale follows her hero across Turkey

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: “Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.” Bell traveled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

Yale

Wednesday

Ross Anderson

Mr. Uygur goes to Washington

You’ve probably seen a clip of Cenk Uygur, founder and host of the progressive online news network the Young Turks. Whatever clip you watched, he was probably shouting. Rarely soft-spoken or caging for clarifications, Uygur is a perennially viral figure in the online drama of right versus left; a passionate progressive advocate who GOES OFF on CORRUPT ELITES and so forth, as such videos are titled, or a hyper-emotive epitome of the “triggered-lib,” who MELTS DOWN to the tune of hundreds of thousands of views for the online right. In the clips and tweets, Trump is a fascist, his supporters are racists, Israel is genocidal, “Establishment” Republicans are corrupt and establishment Democrats are no better.

cenk uygur

Monday

Charles Lipson

In the Eric Adams case, the FBI’s leaks and bias persist

Over the last couple of weeks, the FBI has been ramping up a corruption investigation of New York mayor Eric Adams. The mayor is a political newcomer who was formerly a senior police official in New York, elected, in part, to restore public safety. He has failed to do so. Now, he’s the center of a federal corruption investigation, centered on illegal foreign contributions. No one has been indicted yet. The first shoe to drop publicly was a raid on the Brooklyn home of Adams’s top fundraiser, Brianna Suggs. She was only twenty-three when she headed that major effort. The FBI conducted a surprise search of her home and seized documents and electronic devices. Although the search warrant has not been released, the New York Times reports that they obtained it.

eric adams

Tuesday

Sara Wheeler

‘I glimpse her ahead of me’ – a solo female traveller follows her hero across Turkey

From our UK edition

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: ‘Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.’ Bell travelled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

Wednesday

Barnaby Rogerson

On the trail of Roman Turkey with Don McCullin

From our UK edition

The genesis for our book Journeys across Roman Asia Minor was hatched in the autumn of 1973, when Sir Donald McCullin was a young man. He had been assigned by the Sunday Times to work with the writer Bruce Chatwin on a story that would take them from a murder in Marseille to the Aurès highlands of north-east Algeria. It was an emotionally gruelling journey and they rewarded themselves on the way back by stopping off to look at a solitary Roman ruin. No photographs were taken, but the memory of this place from all those years ago remained embedded in Don’s imagination. Three decades later, that seed bore fruit, as he undertook a series of visits to North Africa. I was lucky enough to accompany him on two of these trips, into western Libya and southern Algeria.

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

The ‘historic’ national dishes which turn out to be artful PR exercises

From our UK edition

In 1889, Raffaele Esposito, the owner of a pizzeria on the edge of Naples’s Spanish Quarter, delivered three pizzas to Queen Margherita, including one of his own invention with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, their colours taken together resembling the Tricolore. The Italian queen loved the pizza, and Esposito duly named it after her. In that restaurant today hangs a document from the royal household, dated 1889, declaring the pizzas made by Esposito to be found excellent by the queen. And so was born the Pizza Margherita, a dish now synonymous with Naples. The queen’s seal of approval in the wake of Italian unification, which had proved difficult for Naples, came to represent the embracing by the governing royal family of an impoverished city by way of their cheapest street food.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rishi Sunak defends Kathleen Stock, food prices rise and AI extinction warning

From our UK edition

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, supported a visit to the Oxford Union by Professor Kathleen Stock, who believes that there are such things as women: ‘University should be an environment where debate is supported, not stifled,’ he said. He said in a separate announcement that he would ban companies from giving out free samples of vaping supplies to people under 18. He then packed his bags for a visit to Washington, DC, in the coming week for talks with President Joe Biden. Delaney Irving, aged 19, from Vancouver Island, won the women’s race at the Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling event near Gloucester. Food prices continued to rise rapidly, according to the British Retail Consortium, by an annual rate of 15.4 per cent in May, compared with the even steeper rate of 15.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rise in sick leave, more rights for renters and moving mountains

From our UK edition

Home The number of people not working due to long-term sickness rose to a record 2.5 million, many with mental sickness or back pain, according to the Office for National Statistics. Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that income tax could be cut by 2p in the pound if Britons who had left the workforce during the pandemic returned to work. Pay growth in the public sector rose to 5.6 per cent, the highest rate since 2003. Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing union, said that the Health Secretary should ‘start off in double figures’ in pay negotiations.

Elif Shafak

Turkey is at an existential crossroads

From our UK edition

The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, ‘under its roof’. Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the Turkish presidential elections drew to a close. This is an existential crossroads for Turkey, my motherland. The AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been in power for two decades. Although they started off on their journey with promises of liberal reforms, a democratic constitution, and plenty of rhetoric about joining the EU, they have become increasingly nationalist, Islamist, patriarchal and authoritarian with each passing year.

Douglas Murray

How to fake it till you make it

From our UK edition

Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast. For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have. Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election was ever likely to be entirely fair and free.

Wednesday

Ece Temelkuran

The final countdown: Turkey is on a knife-edge

From our UK edition

‘Kilicdaroglu’ is a pronunciation nightmare for the non-Turkish. Yet after this Sunday’s presidential elections, international news presenters, who have struggled for 20 years with President Erdogan’s soft ‘g’, might have to work harder to articulate the name of the social democrat leader of opposition. ‘You may call him Mr Kemal [his first name] until he wins,’ I’ve been saying to journalist friends. It’s the kind of simplification that people from complex, non-western countries are self-trained to give so our maddening realities can be better understood: ‘To feel Turkey, imagine the acute polarisation during the Brexit referendum continuing for 20 years. Add to that a far more ruthless Trump with political genius and Islamist aspirations.

Wednesday

John Pietro

Why South Africa is cozying up to Russia and China

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine opened the most dramatic divide between East and West since the Cold War. Most of these divisions were clear beforehand — Hungary and Turkey were longtime thorns in the side of NATO, for example. Yet South Africa’s warming ties with Russia and China seemed to come out of nowhere. South Africa's initial reaction to the invasion was the same as much of the Western world, demanding that Russia leave Ukraine. That did not last, however. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on March 17 that “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.

Saturday

Christopher Sandford

The earthquake that will devastate Seattle

At around eleven in the morning on February 28, 2001, I was standing in front of a mirror in my home in suburban Seattle, adjusting what remained of my hair prior to driving downtown to meet a friend for lunch, when the ground began to shake beneath my feet. The movement lasted about twenty seconds and wasn’t entirely unpleasant, with just the slightest hint of the old days when I was a devotee of Bacchus. After a bit, I checked that the house was all right, looked in on my infant son peacefully asleep in his crib, said goodbye to my wife, started the car and went on my way into the city. It was bedlam out there.

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

How the earthquake is strengthening Syria’s dictatorship

Northwest Syria is one of the most wretched places on earth. The Syrian province of Idlib, straddling the border with Turkey, is a haven for the internally displaced and is in all practicality a state within a state. Throughout Syria’s twelve-year-long civil (and proxy) war, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has treated the area as a dumping ground for fighters who refuse to lay down their arms and civilians who want nothing to do with Assad family control. Idlib, representing 4 percent of Syria’s total land, is now host to 25 percent of its entire population. And that was before the earthquake hit. If Syria’s northwest was a gateway to misery before the tremors, it’s now a hellscape. Entire families have been wiped out. Buildings have been reduced to rubble.

Tuesday

Sam Sweeney

A year in Gaziantep before the earthquake

In 2013, I was studying for a Master’s degree in Beirut when a bomb went off in Baghdad. I remember receiving a message from a friend checking in to see if I was all right — even though I was 500 miles away. It can be hard to convey to people back in the United States that violence in the Middle East is not necessarily a part of everyday life. At times — in Iraq in the years following the US invasion, for example — it is. But such attacks are usually a tragic anomaly. All this stands in stark contrast to news about the earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria, which struck last week and killed at least 36,000 people.

gaziantep

Monday

John Pietro

Enes Kanter Freedom on LeBron, Erdoğan and the earthquake

Basketball player and human rights activist Enes Kanter Freedom was invited as Leader Kevin McCarthy's guest of honor to the State of the Union last week, an address in which President Biden barely touched on foreign policy. The former Boston Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder center spoke with The Spectator about democracy, autocracies and hypocrisy. John Pietro: How far does China’s influence reach into the NBA, in your estimation? Could you see the NBA ever standing up to China in the way the Women’s Tennis Association did in defense of Peng Shuai? Enes Kanter Freedom: I didn’t know how deep the relationship between the NBA and China was until Daryl Morey tweeted and said "stand with Hong Kong" and after that obviously the NBA lost millions and millions of dollars.

enes kanter freedom

Saturday

Daniel Thorpe

Thousands may still be trapped under the rubble in Turkey

From our UK edition

Five days after Monday’s massive earthquakes, the combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 20,000. Local aid workers say around one-third of the casualties are in the Hatay province. The regional capital, Antakya, built on the ancient city of Antioch, is a popular tourist destination famous for its cuisine and cosmopolitan multi-ethnic atmosphere. Many of the mosques, churches, and synagogues in the city’s picturesque old town were also destroyed. On the third morning after the earthquake, a thick layer of smoke settled in the valley where Antakya lies – a residue from the fires the survivors built to keep warm during the freezing night. On the fourth day, many neighbourhoods started to smell of corpses. Thousands are still thought to be under the rubble.