Portside

Twenty-nine years ago the Turkish government was burning Kurdish villages and scattering refugees throughout the region. Some 45,000 people—mostly Kurds— lost their lives in that long-running conflict. Today, Turkey is negotiating with its traditional nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and trying to cut a peace deal that would deliver Kurdish support to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s push to amend Turkey’s constitution and prolong his rule.

The unrest gripping Turkey has less to do with headscarves and Islam than with politics and economics, fueled by a growing discomfort with the AKP’s policies of privatization, its push to centralize authority in the hands of the country’s executive branch, and its silencing of the media. The three are not unrelated.

In sum, when it first made its debut in political discourse in Egypt, the term the "Turkish model" came to embody a vision for a political system in which Egypt's military would retain its unusual privileges and override conventional modes of accountability and transparency all in the name of preserving democratic stability.

The AFL-CIO supports these Turkish labor federations’ call for immediate end to the brutal police crackdown in Turkey. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent a letter to Prime Minister Erdogan supporting the demands of the unions.

Personalizing Google Maps; Mapping Istanbul’s Protests; National DNA Database; Biometrics and Consumer Behavior

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Internet Blocking in Turkey, Jordan and the U.K.; Before the Elections in Iran, the US Says It's OK to Sell Them Cellphones; Internet Revolution in Cuba

Bulent Arinc apologises to original environmental protesters as two men die in continuing demonstrations.

In some ways the Syrian civil war resembles a proxy chess match between supporters of the Bashar al-Assad regime— Iran, Iraq, Russia and China—and its opponents— Turkey, the oil monarchies, the U.S., Britain and France. But the current conflict only resembles chess if the game is played with multiple sides, backstabbing allies, and conflicting agendas.