Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday declared that his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) recent electoral victory in nationwide local elections had, per Reuters, “given him a mandate to ‘liquidate’ the enemies” who he accuses of being behind a still-spiraling graft scandal that has ensnared top AKP elites and plunged the...

• Kindle

Hurriyet Daily News reported on Friday that a planned meeting between European Union (EU) and Turkish officials is set to be postponed because diplomatic interactions between the parties are currently more likely to worsen relations rather than improve them: The relationship between Ankara and Brussels is becoming increasingly estranged, but the relationship...

• Kindle

An Israeli company, GreenTeam Internet, helped Turkish Twitter users evade their government’s much derided Twitter ban. The Times of Israel reports: The Turkish users, said [GreenTeam Internet CEO David] Allouch, weren’t interested in the filtering service offered by GreenTeam, but rather in the fact that the service was offering a...

• Kindle

An official from Turkey’s main opposition party on Tuesday showed journalists a photograph of a top figure from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) standing next to a police chief and an election official as votes were counted in Antalya during the country’s March 30 local elections, the latest in a...

• Kindle

Spokesmen for Hamas hailed the apparent victory of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in municipal elections. One Hamas official, Salah Al-Bardawil, said: The reason behind our happiness at the victory of [Turkish premier Recep] Erdogan and his party is his closeness to the Palestinian cause because our assessment of...

• Kindle

Turkish security officials on Tuesday turned water cannons on protesters marching in reaction to widespread allegations that this weekend’s local elections – which saw the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan secure a plurality of the votes – were marked by fraud, intimidation, and mysterious power outages...

• Kindle

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Sunday that he will “enter the lair” of his rivals and force them to “pay for” having leveled accusations of corruption against him and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), after local elections held across Turkey saw the AKP securing a plurality of the national...

• Kindle

Ars Technica on Thursday reported on an “administrative measure” implemented by Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) shutting down access to YouTube, which the tech-oriented outlet noted was done in an attempt “to stem a flood of leaked audio recordings of government officials before elections...

• Kindle

The New York Times reported Thursday that Turkey suspended YouTube “after an audio recording was uploaded to the platform in which the foreign minister and senior military and intelligence officials could be heard discussing the security situation in Syria.” A Turkish court on Wednesday overturned a government ban on Twitter, the latest...

• Kindle

Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News on Tuesday published an open letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushing back against insinuations, leveled by Erdogan in a recent speech, suggesting that the paper and its parent group were printing reports critical of the government as a result of a complex blackmail scheme. The...

• Kindle