Cyprus-Forum.com

[repulsewarrior]

Turkey starts building controversial mosque in Istanbul square

http://cyprus-mail.com/2017/02/17/decad ... ul-square/

Construction began on Friday of a mosque in Istanbul’s central Taksim square, a controversial project championed by Turkey‘s President Tayyip Erdogan but mired in years of court battles and public debate.

Cranes moved into the site and first cement was poured at a modest ground-breaking ceremony on the edge of the square, long a rallying point for demonstrations, as riot police with armoured vehicles and water cannon stood guard.

...this is Erdogan's Turkey.

[Tim Drayton]

It is worth noting that this is in a part of the city that had a majority non-Muslim population within living memory.

[repulsewarrior]

...news,

ANKARA, Turkey — In 1990, Turkish authorities built a monument to human rights in the center of the Turkish capital. Since May 22, nobody has been able to reach it.

First, the police encircled it with a fence. For a time, they blocked the street it stands on. At one point they even shut a small square nearby that provided access to the street.

These moves carry obvious symbolism at a time of widespread rights abuses in Turkey, but the government also has a more practical goal in mind.

For over six months, a tiny group of former teachers and civil servants — a few of the more than 100,000 people who have been purged from their jobs during Turkey’s continuing crackdown on dissent — had assembled at the statue each day to ask for their jobs back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/worl ... dogan.html

Asked how the thousands of purged civil servants might find the money to eat, one A.K.P official, Osman Zabun, suggested they should be left to starve. “They can go and eat the roots of trees,” he said during the height of the purges in October. “This country has nothing to give to them.”

There is therefore a certain irony in the government’s attempt to end the hunger strike, Ms. Karadag argued. “The message they’re sending,” she said, “is that, ‘We can kill you with hunger, but you can’t kill yourself with hunger.’”

[Tim Drayton]

There is an interview here, translated into English, with the last remaining person trying to keep the hunger strike going at the Human Rights Statue in Ankara now that the other two have been thrown in jail:

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/engl ... e_AKP.html

[Tim Drayton]

Following the above interview, Veli Saçılık had a large number of plastic bullets fired at him during a police assault on Wednesday on this one-man protest by a one-armed man.

[repulsewarrior]

...more plastic bullets,

For the third time since 2015, Istanbul Pride met with resistance from police and ultranationalist activists. On June 25, riot squads fired rubber bullets at those who wished to participate in the parade celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and prevented large crowds from gathering in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. At least 44 people were detained. There was some positive news in all of this: There was no bloodshed and the detained were later released by police.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origina ... z4l96TMW30

[kurupetos]

...more plastic bullets,

For the third time since 2015, Istanbul Pride met with resistance from police and ultranationalist activists. On June 25, riot squads fired rubber bullets at those who wished to participate in the parade celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and prevented large crowds from gathering in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. At least 44 people were detained. There was some positive news in all of this: There was no bloodshed and the detained were later released by police.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/origina ... z4l96TMW30

The dirty homos probably liked it...

[repulsewarrior]

It started here at Gezi. We saw with the coup, Erdogan's grasp of its power; the internet.

...and it continues,

Downloads of Popular Apps Were Silently Swapped For Spyware in Turkey: Citizen Lab (http://www.cbc.ca) 28
Posted by msmash on Friday March 09, 2018 @12:28PM from the security-woes dept.
Matthew Braga, reporting for CBC:
Since last fall, Turkish internet users attempting to download one of a handful of popular apps may have been the unwitting targets of a wide-reaching computer surveillance campaign. And in Egypt, users across the country have, seemingly at random, had their browsing activity mysteriously redirected to online money-making schemes. Internet filtering equipment sold by technology company Sandvine -- founded in Waterloo, Ont. -- is believed to have played a significant part in both.

That's according to new research from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which has examined misuse of similar equipment from other companies in the past. The researchers say it's likely that Sandvine devices are not only being used to block the websites of news, political and human rights organizations, but are also surreptitiously redirecting users toward spyware and unwanted ads. Using network-filtering devices to sneak spyware onto targets' computers "has long been the stuff of legends" according to the report -- a practice previously documented in leaked NSA documents and spyware company brochures, the researchers say, but never before publicly observed.
Citizen Lab notes that targeted users in Turkey and Syria who attempted to download Windows applications from official vendor websites including Avast Antivirus, CCleaner, Opera, and 7-Zip were silently redirected to malicious versions by way of injected HTTP redirects. It adds:
This redirection was possible because official websites for these programs, even though they might have supported HTTPS, directed users to non-HTTPS downloads by default. Additionally, targeted users in Turkey and Syria who downloaded a wide range of applications from CBS Interactive's Download.com (a platform featured by CNET to download software) were instead redirected to versions containing spyware. Download.com does not appear to support HTTPS despite purporting to offer "secure download" links.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/03/09/ ... itizen-lab

[repulsewarrior]

...Mayday,

A handful of labor group representatives were allowed to hold moments of silence in Taksim early in the day. A pro-government union left a wreath at a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic, and carnations nearby to commemorate the 37 people who were killed in 1977 after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a crowd estimated at 500,000 people, sparking a panicked stampede.

Thousands of workers gathered at a rally on the city’s Asian side that was organized by left-wing unions after their request to gather in Taksim was denied again this year. Smaller events were held in cities across Turkey.

Read more:http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/05/turkish-workers-rally-may-day-arrests.html#ixzz5EIESMjjr

[repulsewarrior]

...so, it has not ended, and for the State's Prosecutor, things are just beginning.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190220-pr ... ala-report

http://www.startribune.com/turkey-seeks ... 506096542/

...sadly, what was an effort to preserve a little green space, has become in Erdogan's mind, the coup itself.