Sunday, January 01, 2017

The regular entries will begin again next Sunday.

Have a safe and happy new year.

Turkey is NATO.

It doesn't matter what relationship Turkey has with Russia; it is time for NATO to reinforce the domestic order in Turkey. NATO needs to meet and realize enforcing Turkey will help protect Europe. We don't want Turkey to go by way of Syria. What Russia does in Syria is up to Russia, but, NATO needs to act to protect a vulnerable country in the fight against the violence of extremists.

January 1, 2016
By Erin Cummingham and Kareem Fahim

 Leanne Nasser (click here) was a bright-eyed Arab Israeli teenager, in Istanbul with friends for New Year’s, despite her father’s concerns about safety. Fatih Cakmak, who survived a bomb attack only weeks ago, was hired to work security for a popular nightclub.

Both were among those who died early Sunday when a gunman, brandishing an assault rifle, stormed Istanbul’s famed Reina club on the banks of the Bosporus, gunning down unsuspecting New Year’s revelers in a rampage that was one of the city’s worst mass killings in recent memory.

The assailant remained at large Sunday night, and unidentified except for blurred glimpses of him in security camera footage that showed gunshots sparking off the pavement and victims crumpling to the ground. Thirty-nine people were killed, many of them foreigners, in the latest in a string of assaults that have roiled Turkey as it battles insurgents at home and across the border in war-torn Syria. At least 70 people were wounded....