At first glance, the Sultan Beach Hotel near the Turkish resort town of Bodrum looks like any other seaside resort with its swimming pool, sun chairs and people sipping cool drinks. But a closer look reveals that there are no women to be seen poolside and not a drop of alcohol.
The chances of a war erupting between Turkey and Syria appear to be rising. But the heated rhetoric of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government does not seem to be matched by public enthusiasm for conflict.
Most countries in the world have an emergency telephone number for the police. But in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, an emergency telephone line has been launched for victims of police violence.
A government-backed campaign to strip nine Kurdish MPs of their immunity from prosecution could take Turkey back to the future in its decades-long conflict over Kurdish rights.
Turkey's Ministry of Culture is playing hardball with some of the world’s most prestigious museums. The ministry is refusing to lend historical artifacts to leading museums in the United States and the United Kingdom until they return antiquities that Turkish officials maintain were illegally taken from Turkey.
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which concludes August 18, can be a time of heightened friction in Istanbul, when the beliefs of the pious clash with the lifestyle preferences of secular-minded Turks. This year, Ramadan has been marked by a secularist outcry over recent efforts to restrict the consumption of alcohol.
In a display of muscle-flexing, Turkish tanks this week carried out military exercises on the Syrian border, just a few kilometers away from towns that Syrian Kurds had seized from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
One of the defining achievements of Justice and Development Party’s tenure in power in Turkey has been forcing the country’s once omnipotent army firmly back into the barracks and out of political life. Yet the military's economic power has been largely left untouched.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's expressed desire to create a more powerful presidency threatens to complicate efforts to re-write Turkey's military-era constitution in order to provide clearer guarantees of individual liberties, local analysts believe.
As Islam takes on a more visible public profile in Turkey, academia is becoming a battleground over the theory of evolution. Scholars who espouse creationist ideas are becoming more assertive in challenging Darwinism.
