By Alexei Anishchuk | Reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia warned Israel on Wednesday that attacking Iran would be a disastrous and played down the failure of a U.N. nuclear agency mission to Tehran, saying there is still a chance for new talks over the Iranian atomic programme.

“Of course any possible military scenario against Iran will be catastrophic for the region and for the whole system of international relations,” Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told a news conference.

It was one of Russia’s starkest warnings against resorting to force, an option Israel and the United States have not ruled out if they conclude that diplomacy and increasing sanctions will not stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

“I hope Israel understands all these consequences … and they should also consider the consequences of such action for themselves,” Gatilov said. “I hope a realistic approach will prevail, along with a sensible assessment.”

Russia, China as well as many allies of the United States are concerned that any military action against Iran could engulf the Middle East in wider war, which would send oil prices rocketing at a time of global economic troubles.

Iran has threatened to retaliate for any attack, or even if it feels endangered, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for Gulf oil exports crucial to the global economy, and hitting Israel and U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Tehran has refused to stop sensitive nuclear work such as uranium enrichment despite four rounds of U.N. sanctions and a slew of additional measures imposed by the United States and the European Union, which fear Tehran is seeking nuclear weapons.

The Islamic Republic says its efforts to produce nuclear fuel are solely for electricity generation.

IAEA-IRAN TALKS GO NOWHERE

The failure of two days of talks between Iran and senior International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials, who were refused access to a military site where they believe Iran tested explosives of use in nuclear weapons, dimmed the chances of Western powers agreeing to renew broader negotiations with Iran.

A warning from Iran’s clerical supreme leader on Wednesday, hours after the Tehran talks concluded, that no obstacle would derail Iran’s nuclear course added to tensions.

Gatilov suggested that Iran should be more cooperative but there is more room for diplomacy. He said Iran’s discussions with Russia, China, the United States, Britain, France and Germany, frozen for a year, could still be revived.

“Iran and IAEA should boost their dialogue in order to rule out the … possibility of the existence of military dimensions in the Iranian nuclear programme. We hope that this dialogue will be continued,” he said.

“I think we still have opportunity to continue diplomatic efforts, to renew the six-nation talks.”

Russia, which built Iran’s first nuclear power plant, has often stressed the need for talks and that too much coercive pressure on Iran is counterproductive, a stance that has prompted concerns Moscow has helped Tehran play for time.

Last week, Russia said global powers must be serious about proposing solutions Iran might accept, warning that Tehran’s desire for compromise was waning as it moved closer to being technically capable of building atomic weapons.

(Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

news.yahoo.com, 22 Feb 2012

IRAN (is not the problem) is a feature length film responding to the failure of the American mass media to provide the public with relevant and accurate information about the standoff between the US and Iran, as happened before with the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

We have heard that Iran is a nuclear menace in defiance of the international community, bent on “wiping Israel off the map”, supporting terrorism, and unwilling to negotiate. This documentary disputes these claims as they are presented to us and puts them in the context of present and historical US imperialism and hypocrisy with respect to Iran.
It looks at the struggle for democracy inside Iran, the consequences of the current escalation and the potential US and/or Israeli attack, and suggests some alternatives to consider.

This 79 minute documentary features Antonia Juhasz (The Bu$h Agenda), Larry Everest (Oil, Power, and Empire), and other activists and Iranian-Americans. The DVD also contains a 20 minute preview version ideal for meetings. The goal of this movie is to promote dialog and change the debate on Iran, so please consider organizing a screening, big or small, in your area.

Produced by Aaron Newman, an independent film-maker and part of the Scary Cow film co-op in San Francisco. He is an anti-imperialism/pro-democracy activist, founder of the SF Chomsky Book Club, and a member of Hands Off Iran

There are differences of opinion between many of the voices in this film, but all agree that a war would be unjustified. Below are brief video introductions for each of the people who participated.

■ Minorities and ethnic groups call for more rights in Turkey’s new constitution

Comment Kurdish consensus at home can serve Ankara abroad

■ Turkey moves ahead with new constitution

Topic

Christians in the Middle East

Turkey

“A new Turkey is being born,” said Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and spiritual leader of the world’s estimated 300 million Orthodox Christians, after addressing a parliamentary panel in Ankara on Monday. “For the first time in the era of the republic, a formal invitation like this has been extended to the minorities,” the patriarch said, according his spokesman, Father Dositheos.

The parliamentary panel, known as the Committee for Constitutional Agreement, is gathering views from all sectors of Turkish society in preparation for writing a new constitution, which is due for completion by the end of the year. The current constitution was written under military rule in 1982.

The appearances of Bartholomew I and representatives of Turkey’s Syriac Orthodox Christians at a parliamentary hearing this week marked the first time that Christian groups were officially consulted in such a major political project in Turkey. A Jewish group met the lawmakers in December. One political scientist said the significance of their testimonies was difficult to exaggerate.

“It is a matter of political symbolism,” said Ioannis N Grigoriadis, who teaches at Bilkent University in Ankara. “It is very, very important,” he said in a telephone interview with The National.

But the remarks of Bartholomew I was also a reminder of one of thorniest problems facing the committee: how to safeguard the rights of religious minorities.

In his 45-minute appearance before the committee, the patriarch renewed his call for the reopening of a Greek Orthodox seminary on Heybeliada, an island near Istanbul. The church has been unable to train new priests and bishops since the seminary was closed in 1971.

Bartholomew I, who was born on the northern Aegean island of Gokceada, a centre of the small Greek community in Turkey, is a graduate of the Heybeliada seminary. After meeting the lawmakers in Ankara, the patriarch said he was “leaving with hope”. He submitted an 18-page list of demands of the Orthodox Christian community to committee members.

Turkey, a country with a 99 per cent Muslim population, is a secular republic that officially grants equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of their religion. Still, Christians and Jews say they face problems in educating their clergy, protecting property rights and getting government jobs.

In his meeting with the committee, Bartholomew I noted that he was required to arrange his contacts with Turkish officials through the country’s foreign ministry, even though he was a Turkish citizen. “We do not want to be second-class citizens,” he said.

The Turkish state does not recognise Bartholomew I’s role as Ecumenical Patriarch because of fears that the Orthodox Church could try to establish its own version of the Vatican on Turkish soil. Turkish authorities recognise him only as the leader of the small community of about 3,000 to 5,000 Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey.

About 100,000 Christians and 30,000 Jews live in Turkey, a country of 75 million people. Only Jews, Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians are officially recognised as religious minorities under a 1923 treaty, while groups, such as the roughly 10,000 Syriac Orthodox Christians, whose traditional home is the region around Mardin near the Syrian border, do not have an official status as a church.

At the meeting in Ankara on Monday, Syriac Christians asked for formal recognition as a minority, said Rudi Sumer, a Syriac lawyer who represented the group at the hearing. Mr Sumer told The National by telephone that Syriacs were calling for more cultural rights and for Syriac Orthodox clerics to be paid by the state, just as Turkey’s imams are.

“We hope that our views are heard, but we have to wait for the outcome to be sure,” Mr Sumer said.

Since coming to power in late 2002, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has widened minority rights, and it recently started a process of returning confiscated real estate to non-Muslim groups. Granting more rights to religious minorities has been one of the main demands of the European Union, which Turkey wants to join.

Mr Grigoriadis said the Turkish government had undertaken “many positive steps” to improve the situation of non-Muslims.

“Until a relatively short time ago, the patriarchate was ignored by Ankara, and now the patriarch is invited by parliament.”

tseibert@thenational.ae

via Turkey reaches out to its minorities in another step for writing new constitution – The National.

* Uighur protesters burn Chinese flag, Xi poster

* China is Turkey’s 15th biggest export market

* Erdogan says will visit China in coming months (Adds meeting with Erdogan)

By Tulay Karadeniz

ANKARA, Feb 21 (Reuters) – Activists from China’s Muslim Uighur minority burnt Chinese flags in Ankara on Tuesday where China’s leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping was holding talks with Turkish officials on regional issues.

About 60 Turkic-speaking Uighurs from China’s northwestern Xinjiang province protested outside the hotel where Xi was staying in the Turkish capital on the last leg of a trip that also took him to the United States and Ireland.

Xi, almost sure to succeed Hu Jintao as president in just over a year, praised Turkey’s role in trying to resolve issues such as the Iranian nuclear dispute and Middle East conflicts.

Waving the flag of East Turkestan, pale blue with a white star and crescent, the protesters burnt a Chinese flag and a poster of Xi before police moved in to disperse them.

Rights groups accuse China of abuses during a crackdown after Uighur riots in 2009 and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan then described the events as a “genocide”. Turkey is home to thousands of Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang since the Chinese Communists took over the region in 1949.

Xi said China had made great strides to raise the living standards of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

Turkey and China are at either end of a political and economic axis stretching along the old silk road though Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan. Both have strong, sometimes competing economic interests in the region.

Turkey, now the world’s 16th biggest economy and only second to China in growth last year, has projected itself as a stable Muslim democracy, making it a key player at a time of turmoil and unrest in the Middle East.

“A member of the G20 with a growing economy and an important country in the Middle East, Turkey has for a long time tried to bring stability and development to the region and played an active role in trying to solve ‘hot’ issues,” Xi told Turkey’s Sabah newspaper listing Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear and Middle East peace efforts.

BILLION DOLLAR DEALS

Turkey has sought to mediate between the West and Iran in a dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme and has broadly shared China’s opposition to stronger sanctions against Tehran.

But on Syria their positions have been sharply at odds.

While Turkey has taken a leading role in pressuring Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to step down, China, along with Russia, this month blocked a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that backed an Arab plan urging him to quit.

China has also not decided whether to accept an invitation to discuss Syria with other world powers this week in Tunisia, a meeting Turkey’s foreign minister will attend and Ankara hopes will keep up pressure for Assad to step down.

Xi met President Abdullah Gul on Tuesday and signed seven bilateral economic agreements.

The central banks of Turkey and China signed a three-year currency swap agreement worth $1.6 billion which will be effective for three years, both sides said. The two countries could discuss extending its maturity after that.

China has signed a series of bilateral currency agreements with foreign countries as part of efforts to promote the use of the yuan in cross-boarder trade and investment.

The Turkish energy ministry also said China’s Avic International and Turkey’s Hema Endustri, a Turkish engineering manufacturing company, will sign a $1 billion deal for power plant and coal production equipment.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said the agreement could lead to cooperation with China on building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.

Xi later travelled to Istanbul for talks with Erdogan, who is recovering from surgery at home there. Citing prime ministerial officials, Turkish state media said the two men met for one hour where they agreed to increase economic cooperation.

During the meeting, which was closed to the media, Erdogan accepted a formal invitation by Xi to visit China and said he would travel there in the coming months, state-run Anatolian news agency reported.

On Wednesday, Xi attends a business forum in Istanbul, where he is likely to be assailed by exporters eager to try to bridge a gaping trade gap.

China is Turkey’s 15th biggest export market with nearly $2.5 billion of Turkish goods sold there last year, a rise of 8.7 percent. But some $21.6 billion worth of Chinese goods were imported to Turkey in 2011, up 26 percent from 2010. (Additional reporting by Jon Hemming, Orhan Coskun and Jonathon Burch; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Maria Golovnina)

via UPDATE 3-Uighur protests as China’s Xi visits Turkey | Reuters.

ISTANBUL—China and Turkey set aside differences on how to quell escalating violence in Syria on Tuesday, as Vice President Xi Jinping began the final leg of a diplomatic tour seen as a dress rehearsal for Chinese leadership by overseeing a series of bilateral business deals, including a central bank swap deal to boost trade in local currencies.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul, left, and China’s Vice President Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony in Ankara

Mr. Xi, widely presumed to be China’s next top leader, signed the three-year currency-swap pact between Turkey’s central bank and the People’s Bank of China alongside Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul in Ankara on Tuesday.

The two leaders, who signed five other business agreements, didn’t make any public statements before the Chinese vice president headed to Istanbul to meet Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but Turkish officials were expected to relay their growing concerns over the gathering violence in neighboring Syria.

Ankara has repeatedly said the world can’t remain silent in the face of an 11-month revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, which appears to be degenerating into civil war. China, along with Russia, has vetoed two United Nations Security Council resolutions backing Arab League plans seeking an end to the conflict and condemning a crackdown on protests that killed 5,400 in 2011 alone, according to the U.N.

Ankara reacted furiously when Beijing, along with Moscow, vetoed the second resolution earlier this month, proposing a summit on Syria to help coordinate policy outside the Security Council.

As activists reported that Syrian government troops continued to shell restive districts in the opposition stronghold of Homs, killing at least 16 people, official communication from Mr. Xi’s diplomatic visit made no mention of Syria, or the stalling diplomatic attempts to halt the violence.

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported that Mr. Xi and the Turkish President discussed “regional and international affairs of common concerns,” though neither side initially offered details.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported that China was interested in investing in Turkish economic projects and that Prime Minister Erdogan had accepted Mr. Xi’s offer to visit Beijing.

The conspicuous silence on developments across the border in Syria disappointed Turkish analysts, who had hoped the meeting of two rising powers with expanding interests in the Middle East, could offer some clue on whether Beijing would soften its objection to intervention to quell the violence amid growing fears that the revolt against the Assad regime is degenerating into civil war.

China in recent weeks has given little indication it would support Western intervention, despite heightened criticism in Turkey, Europe and the U.S. that it was serving as an obstructionist to restoring peace there. Rather, senior Chinese leaders and state-run media have delivered unusually direct defenses of China’s position. China has a strict foreign policy of noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs, which in recent years it has used to block international intervention on humanitarian grounds alone. Additionally, China fears unrest toward authoritarian regimes in the Arab world could spread to Beijing if aided by the West, analysts say.

“Our position hasn’t changed,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei at a news briefing Tuesday. He said China was willing to work with the international community to resolve the crisis in Syria, but said China didn’t welcome external arms or interference in the conflict.

Mr. Hong confirmed China had received an invitation to a “Friends of Syria” meeting backed by Western powers and the Arab League set for Friday in Tunis, but didn’t say whether China would participate. Russia confirmed on Tuesday that it wouldn’t participate in the meeting because the Syrian government wouldn’t be represented, stoking fears that the group would struggle to gain legitimacy.

Mr. Xi, who will become China’s Communist Party chief in a once-a-decade leadership transition that begins late this year, will have to forge a consensus on sensitive foreign-policy issues among powerful political forces in China, including state-owned enterprises and the military.

Many questions remain about his approach to policy, though he is viewed by U.S. officials and other political analysts as a business-friendly politician, perhaps less driven by communist ideology than his predecessors.

Nonetheless, analysts said Mr. Xi wouldn’t be able stray significantly from the prevailing party line on Syria and other Middle East issues, lest he risk upstaging China’s current leadership, including President Hu Jintao.

Chinese leaders, including Premier Wen Jiabao, have said China isn’t defending the Assad regime. They argue the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for Mr. Assad’s resignation ran afoul with the U.N. charter. In addition to vetoing the Security Council’s resolution, China last week was one among just 12 U.N. member states to oppose a nonbinding resolution condemning the Syrian government.

Earlier on Turkey on Tuesday Mr. Xi was confronted with one sensitive domestic issue, as a group of protesters gathered outside his Ankara hotel to demonstrate against Beijing’s crackdown against Turkic-speaking Uighurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. Violence between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, left nearly 200 dead in western China in 2009 in the worst riots in the country’s far west in more than a decade.

Turkey’s Parliament Speaker Cemil Cicek earlier said that Ankara respects China’s “sovereignty and territorial unity” in an apparent reference to the issue.

via China, Turkey Sidestep Syria Issue to Sign Business Pacts – WSJ.com.

Istanbul will be the 76th international destination that United serves from New York/Newark and the 37th city in United’s trans-Atlantic route network. With service to points in the Americas, Europe and Asia, United offers more flights from the New York area to more destinations worldwide than any other airline.

“We are excited to add Istanbul to our global route network,” said Jim Compton, United’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer. “This new service will provide customers throughout the United States, Canada and Latin America direct access to one of the most important cities in the region.”

Convenient Schedules

United flight 904 will depart New York/Newark daily at 7:27 p.m. and arrive in Istanbul at 12:20 p.m. the next day. Flight 905 will depart Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport daily at 1:55 p.m. and arrive at New York/Newark at 6:02 p.m. the same day.

The airline will initially operate the services with three-cabin Boeing 767-300 aircraft with 183 seats – six in United Global First, 26 in United BusinessFirst and 151 in United Economy, including 67 Economy Plus seats with added legroom. Effective Aug. 28, the airline will operate the service with two-cabin Boeing 767-300 aircraft with 214 seats – 30 in BusinessFirst and 184 in Economy, including 46 Economy Plus seats. Both United Global First and United BusinessFirst feature flat-bed seats, along with a wide range of premium-cabin services and amenities.

via United Airlines to introduce daily New York – Istanbul service | News | Breaking Travel News.

Istanbul is the largest city of Turkey. The Istanbul metropolitan province (municipality) had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey’s population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe (including the Asian side of the city), after London and Moscow. The city is located in northwestern Turkey within the Marmara Region on a total area of 5,343 square kilometers (2,063 sq mi).

Turkey is divided into seven census regions: Marmara, Aegean, Black Sea, Central Anatolia, Eastern Anatolia, Southeastern Anatolia and the Mediterranean. The uneven north Anatolian terrain running along the Black Sea resembles a long, narrow belt. This region comprises approximately one-sixth of Turkey’s total land area. As a general trend, the inland Anatolian plateau becomes increasingly rugged as it progresses eastward. Turkey’s varied landscapes are the product of complex earth movements that have shaped the region over thousands of years and still manifest themselves in fairly frequent earthquakes and occasional volcanic eruptions. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles owe their existence to the fault lines running through Turkey that led to the creation of the Black Sea.

via Earth Snapshot • The Bosphorus, Istanbul and Mountainous Terrain of Turkey – February 21st, 2012.

(File/Associated Press) – FILE – In this Sept. 30, 2011 file photo, two landmarks, Sultan Ahmed Mosque, left, and Hagia Sophia, seen with the Bosporus, in Istanbul, Turkey. If a project has no deadline, is it really a project? What do you call a negotiation process in which the partners can’t talk about key issues? These are existential times for Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, an ambitious vision that has become increasingly ambiguous

At a time when Greece’s survival in the eurozone is in jeopardy, it seems academic to debate a Turkish entry to European ranks that some Turks feel won’t happen in their lifetime, if at all. The more pressing question is whether the suitors should, as with any soured romance, call it quits or rekindle the flame.

When accession talks began in 2005, the idea was that Turkey’s Muslim population would enrich the continent, culturally and economically, with Turkey itself destined to become a European-style democracy that could serve as an east-west bridge.

More than six years later, doubt haunts hope.

Economic troubles mean that Europe, where skepticism toward the Turkish bid was already building, has little energy to expand, while in Turkey reform efforts have slowed and the nation has sought to carve out a leadership role in the Middle East.

“Without a deadline, without a final aim, there is no process,” said Cengiz Aktar, a political science professor at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. “There can’t be an endless project.”

Aktar, who attended the opening of an EU information office at the university on Friday, said it was “high time” for a reassessment of Turkey’s bid. He rejected the argument that EU-backed reform alone was enough, as though the journey was as good as the destination.

The debate is in limbo partly because France and Germany, which have spoken against full Turkish membership, hold elections this year and 2013 respectively, and no bold initiatives are expected during the political campaign season.

Even if those European heavyweights choose governments that are more sympathetic to Turkey’s candidacy, there is no sign of progress on a long-running dispute over EU member Cyprus, where the Greek-speaking south observes European rules and Turkey aids and occupies the isolated Turkish Cypriot north.

Jean-Maurice Ripert, the EU’s new ambassador to Turkey, said more joint teams would be formed to lay technical groundwork for accession in case political conditions improve in the years ahead. He cited 40,000 student exchanges between Turkey and the EU last year, as well as EU plans to spend 800 million euros ($1.06 billion) this year on European development projects in Turkey.

“Don’t think that nothing is happening,” he said in a meeting with foreign journalists. Since his January arrival, Ripert said, Turkish officials have assured him of their commitment to joining the European Union and voiced frustration with what they see as European opposition.

In the past decade, Turkey has evolved into a regional powerhouse whose foreign policy remains in step with, but no longer defined by, its allies in NATO. Europe, meanwhile, was signaling fatigue with the idea of expansion well before it sank into recession.

“In Brussels nowadays, you hear very little talk of enlargement,” said Sinan Ulgen, chairman of EDAM, a research center in Istanbul, and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in the Belgian capital. “The main issue is essentially the economic crisis.”

Numbers tell the story of the failure and potential of the Turkish bid, a legacy of Ottoman sultans who sought to upgrade their crumbling empire with European ideas, as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the national founder who looked westward for inspiration.

Half of the three-dozen subjects, or chapters, in membership negotiations are blocked. No new chapter has been opened since June 2010. However, Europe accounts for nearly half of Turkey’s foreign trade, as well as about 85 percent of foreign direct investment there.

Turkey once highly anticipated the EU’s annual report on its membership progress. Interest has dwindled. European officials have expressed concern about minority rights, the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression, and Turkey has slammed Greek Cypriot vetoes of negotiations and a French bill that would criminalize denial that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was a genocide.

“The Europe that is afraid of speaking and arguing has nothing to give humanity,” Turkey’s Anadolu agency quoted Egeman Bagis, minister for EU affairs, as saying. “But the EU that we always emphasize being the most comprehensive peace project in the history of humanity has to be more courageous and liberal.”

Andrew Gardner, an Amnesty International researcher, said EU-inspired legislative reform in Turkey had resulted in fewer reported cases of torture in police stations and prisons, but warned of a “regression of the human rights situation” in Turkey, particularly with regard to free expression. He also cited the negative impact of statements by EU leaders suggesting Turkey might not be accepted as a full member even if it fulfills human rights obligations.

Suat Kiniklioglu, a former ruling party lawmaker and director of the Ankara-based Center for Strategic Communication, captured the ambiguity that shrouds Turkey’s EU campaign by offering two ways to look at it.

The first: “The process is going nowhere and neither side is willing to admit it. This is heading toward a slow death.”

The second, which he prefers: “The current impasse is actually not that bad as Europe needs time to sort out its own problems while Turkey will continue to grow and reform domestically at its own pace. The negotiations can be revived any time the two sides feel they are ready.”

Ulgen, the visiting scholar in Brussels, said a “vicious circle” had developed, in which Turkey, once praised for its reform program, loses enthusiasm for a process that it believes is unfair, while Europe loses leverage over a process that some of its leaders treat with ambivalence.

“We’re in standstill mode,” he said. According to Ulgen, Turkey and the European Union must eventually decide what kind of a relationship they want because: “We cannot continue to pretend anymore that the negotiations are continuing.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501714_162-57381533/eu-and-turkey-talks-languish-trade-booms/

SHANGHAI, Feb 20 (Bernama) — The China edition of the National Geographic Traveller, one of the biggest culture and travel magazines in the world, published a supplement and promoted Istanbul.

The 21-page supplement included observations of a Chinese citizen living in the Turkish metropolis, and told about traditional Ottoman and Turkish cultures.

According to Anadolu news agency, it also published an interview with Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Chinese teacher, Ging Yang, has been living in Istanbul since 2007.

The supplement wrote about Turkish people’s tea affection, and promoted Istanbul’s history, mosques, culture and Turkish food, particularly Turkish doner kebab.

– BERNAMA

via BERNAMA – National Geographic China Promotes Istanbul.

While Minister Bagish has diplomatic immunity, the rest of Turkey’s population does not enjoy such a privilege. It may be a good idea to accord immunity to all 72 million Turks in order to shield them from prosecution, when they utter the words “Armenian Genocide” in Turkey!