Turkey’s highest court overturned a politically controversial law on Thursday that allowed students to wear the Muslim headscarf at university, dealing a blow to the country’s Islamist-leaning government and its chances of survival.
In a decision with significant implications for Turkey’s future, the constitutional court upheld an appeal from opposition parties that the law — passed by parliament in February — posed a threat to its 85-year-old secular system.
The headscarf issue has become one of the most highly charged in Turkish politics, with the ruling justice and development party (AKP) seeing it as a question of religious freedom, while opponents portray it as a potential gateway to a more Islamic society.
The ruling was a setback for the AKP, which is embroiled in a separate case — also before the constitutional court — to outlaw the party and ban its officials from politics for alleged anti-secular activity.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from
A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than 100 victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s black community, the mayor said on Friday. Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. The man was in his 20s when he was killed. “This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,”