Cyprus-Forum.com

by **repulsewarrior** » Sat Sep 19, 2015 7:10 pm

In the end, Beykpour made the trip, and walked away from it with the idea for what would eventually become Periscope, the company he later sold to Twitter.
“That was the initial use case,” Beykpour said. “It was, I want to see what’s happening in this street in Istanbul or at Gezi Park.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/ ... .lyJxYOyy7

Periscope, second biggest user in the world is Turkey.

...what is interesting about the article is how Turkey's travails, the use of social media within it, changed social media (for the rest of us) as it sought to adapt and improve itself.

by **DrCyprus** » Sun Sep 20, 2015 10:52 am

Noone remembers all these events now. Sad.

by **repulsewarrior** » Sun Sep 27, 2015 7:30 pm

Turkish Hurriyet Daily News (22.09.15) reports that a probe has been opened into 94 people for participating in the Gezi Park protests more than two years after the events, with the suspects facing up to six years in prison.
Public Prosecutor Cevdet Aydemir opened a probe for 94 people who attended a protest in the western province of Izmir in June 2013, seeking prison terms up to six years for each with charges of violating assembly and demonstrations laws.

The Gezi Park incidents began as a peaceful protest against a shopping mall construction project in Istanbul's central Taksim neighbourhood before turning into country-wide protests against the government. TURKISH AFFAIRS SECTION

http://www.moi.gov.cy/pio

...forgotten maybe for some.

by **repulsewarrior** » Sun Oct 25, 2015 1:12 am

A local court in Istanbul has sentenced 244 participants in the 2013 Gezi protests to jail time for a range of crimes, including “polluting a mosque.”

The 55th Criminal Court of First Instance in Istanbul on Oct. 23 sentenced 244 of 255 defendants to between two months, 15 days and one year, two-months 16 days’ imprisonment. Only four of the defendants were acquitted, while charges against four suspects were separated from the case file.

Some 255 protesters, including seven foreigners, were charged with a range of offenses including violating laws on demonstrations, “damaging public property,” “taking part in illegal demonstrations,” “causing interruptions in public services,” “damaging a place of worship,” and “protecting criminals.” The indictment sought between one and 11 years, six months in jail for the suspects.

According to the Oct. 23 ruling, four suspects were sentenced to 10 months of imprisonment for “polluting a mosque,” while two suspects were sentenced to two years, two months for “wearing doctors’ coats.” The local court, however, postponed the penalties.

The four defendants who were sentenced for “polluting a mosque” were doctors who provided emergency aid to protesters in the Dolmabahçe Bezm-i Alem Valide Sultan Mosque in Beşiktaş, where protesters injured in a police attack were being treated.

Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insistently claimed that protesters had drunk alcohol inside the mosque after escaping from a police attack in the area, despite assertions from the mosque’s muezzin that no such activity had occurred.

The Gezi protests began in late May 2013 as an effort to stop bulldozers from razing central Istanbul’s Gezi Park, one of the few green spaces left in the city’s Taksim neighborhood, to build a shopping mall. Unrest quickly spread across Turkey, developing into a revolt against what protesters said was the increasing authoritarianism of Erdoğan’s decade-long rule.

Eight protesters were killed during the unrest.
October/23/2015

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkis ... sCatID=509

by **repulsewarrior** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 5:00 am

In the words of one columnist, Vote and Beyond is “the best thing we have seen since Gezi” — a reference to the mass anti-government protests that erupted at Istanbul’s Gezi Park and quickly spread nationwide in the summer of 2013. For the pro-government media, however, the movement is a Western-backed ploy aimed at discrediting the elections.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origina ... z3q14sv94m

by **repulsewarrior** » Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:51 am

http://www.breitbart.com/national-secur ... -november/

...interesting, i don't know how credible, but strongly written.

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum adds some clarity to what effect these voters may have had, noting that the AKP received nine percent more votes between June and November.

Rubin suggests that a reason for the massive growth in voter numbers could be that the AKP “registered people in multiple centers, so that they could vote twice (or more).”

Vote and Beyond, an independent election monitoring group active during Sunday’s election, reported that they indeed identified election discrepancies during their tour of Turkish election facilities. They described the discrepancies as “minor incompliances,” however, having found their tally differed from the government’s by 10,000 votes. “We spotted a discrepancy of 10,000 out of the total 48,000,000 votes cast across Turkey,” their statement read, noting that they did not believe this difference was non-negligible, and that it was reasonably similar to the discrepancies found in the June election.

The AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received almost 50 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, allowing it to govern without forming a coalition government. The People’s Democratic Party (HDP), the leftist pro-Kurdish party largely responsible for diminishing the AKP’s vote in June, barely stayed in Parliament with ten percent of the vote. Violence against government opposition and pro-Kurdish groups forced HDP candidates to cancel any public rallies for fear of creating a target for terrorists; candidates campaigned in their districts door-to-door.

In Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish stronghold city, protesters were attacked with water cannons and tear gas following the announcement of the results of that election. Images surfacing from inside the city showed anti-AKP protesters armed with stones and vehicles in flames on the streets. Diyarbakir is currently under a mandatory curfew to curb violence.

by **Tim Drayton** » Fri Nov 06, 2015 8:47 am

I believe the poll was rigged and I am hoping that firm evidence of this will emerge.

by **Tim Drayton** » Tue Dec 29, 2015 6:26 pm

As the witch hunt against those involved in the Gezi protests continues, there was good news today as Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 13 acquitted almost all of the members of the group of Beşiktaş supporters known as Çarşı, which played a big role in the protests.

The court decided that the elements of the offences of creating and managing an organisation and membership of an organisation did not occur. It also decided that there was inadequate conclusive evidence that the group was attempting to overthrow the country through force and violence, and that the allegations of breach of the Meetings and Demonstration Marches Law and obstructing the performance of duty were not substantiated. All of the accused were acquitted on these counts.

Of the thirty-five accused, only four were convicted. One of the accused was found guilty of carrying a forbidden knuckleduster and another of carrying an illegal weapon. They received suspended prison sentences of five and ten months respectively, and fines. Two other accused were found guilty of being in unauthorized possession of dangerous substances and moving them from one place to another, and they were sentenced to two and a half year prison sentences, not suspended, and a fine.

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/spor ... arari.html