Free Republic

Police officers delivered a notice from a district governor that alleged the show at Depo Istanbul incited the public to hatredTurkish authorities have banned an exhibition exploring the art and history of the country’s transgender community in what is a rare intervention at a gallery. The move comes as the government intensifies a crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community. Depo Istanbul, a non-profit space that was established by the now-imprisoned philanthropist Osman Kavala, was forced by police to take down Turn and See Back: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Turkey on 11 July. Officers delivered a notice from a district governor that...

Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet), which controls 90,000 mosques globally and employs 140,000 people, mandated that women must cover their entire body except for the face, hands, and feet, asserting that veiling is an Islamic command, not a personal choice. The mask has come off, and the facade of the Left-Islamic alliance has been removed. The insistence that Islamic dress for women is a matter of modesty and personal choice has been debunked by a top Islamic authority. But will the Western, Islam-enabling left-wing media report this truth or continue to assist Islam in its quest for dominance in the...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently warned Israel against cutting off Palestinian banks and spoke about the need to increase aid to Gaza, that is, Hamas, even further. Yellen’s words gained little attention, as the Biden regime’s betrayal of Israel is now old news. It is now widely known that the regime, deeply afraid that it could lose Michigan in November, has brought a seventy-year-old alliance perilously close to rupture to gain the Arab vote. Yet the betrayal of Israel didn’t begin when the polls started looking bad for Old Joe. The seeds of it were planted long before Hamas massacred...

ISTANBUL, July 12 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday it is not possible for NATO to continue its partnership with the Israeli administration. "Until comprehensive, sustainable peace is established in Palestine, attempts at cooperation with Israel within NATO will not be approved by Turkey," Erdogan said at a news conference at the NATO summit. Turkey also continues its diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, he said. Erdogan said as well that he has instructed Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to start to restore relations with Syria.

Three-quarters of Europe’s Jewish community hide their identities as they fear being harassed or attacked by anti-Semites. Jews in EU member states are in the grip of a “rising tide of anti-Semitism”, an EU rights agency that conducted the survey said, as it blamed increased tensions over the war in Gaza. Across Europe, 76 per cent said in the survey they hid their Jewish identity “at least occasionally” while 34 per cent said they took care to avoid Jewish events or places as they did not feel “safe” there. Sirpa Rautio, the director of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights...

Archaeologists working at a site in Turkey uncovered a rare, threatening seal from the ancient Hittite empire, according to a report published Sunday. The terracotta seal was found throughout excavations at the Büklükale (Kaman-Kalehöyük) site in Turkey and is believed to have belonged to the Hittite royal family, according to Anatolian Archaeology. Inscribed on the seal are the words (roughly translated): “Whoever breaks this will die.” Archaeologists led by Dr. Kimiyoshi Matsumura reportedly found the seal in 2023 and translated the cuneiform, finding the surprising threat. Researchers believe that Hittite laws were focused on fines rather than the death penalty...

Schmidt thought this demonstrated that complex social organization and the performance of rituals actually predated permanent settlement and agriculture, and that the people who banded together and built the monumental structures were nomadic hunter-gatherers. He suggested that, eventually, the demands of gathering these nomads together in one place to carve and move the huge T-pillars and build the circular enclosures pushed them to take the next step and begin domesticating plants and animals in order to create a more dependable food supply. These innovations, he argued, spread from the hilltop throughout the region and eventually the globe. Ritual and religion,...

Steve Forbes warns that a major war between Israel and Iran, which could bring in more nations, is nearly inevitable.

More than 40 years ago, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Çakir caused a stir among Anatolian archaeologists when he showed them sketches of objects that he had seen lying 150 feet deep on the seafloor off the coast of Kas, in southwestern Turkey. He described them as "metal biscuits with ears," but experts immediately recognized them as a type of metal bar known as an oxhide ingot that was commonly traded during the Bronze Age, 3,500 years ago.Authorities immediately began to search for the site, and soon came across the artifacts that Çakir had spotted not far offshore of...

FBI probe comes months after agency seized mayor's electronic devices Federal authorities are investigating New York City Mayor Eric Adams' use of a private email addresses and how records from seven trips he made to China have disappeared....At least one of the trips, per the outlet, was partly funded by the Chinese Communist Party...The private email accounts cannot be traced on New York City government servers, meaning that key details, such as who paid for the trips and with whom he met, remain concealed...

BEST EFFORT SUMMARY: Why has WEF shut down investigation of the site for 150 years? Gobekli Tepeis a 12,000-year-old temple (7,000 years older than and fifty times the size of Stonehenge and 5,000 years before the known invention of the wheel) that predates humanity's oldest known civilizations and is full of strange animal carvings and towering stone pillars. Discovered in Turkey in 1995, it is the oldest, largest and most mysterious archaeological site ever found. Composed of pillars that are upward of 20 feet tall and weigh 20 metric tons. Construction would require enormous amounts of work, ingenuity and...

The head of the Shiite Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to expand his war against Israel in a speech on Wednesday, boasting that he allegedly has 100,000 terrorists at his disposal and suggesting war with Cyprus may also be imminent. Hezbollah, one of many Iranian proxy terrorist organizations, has long maintained ties with the Sunni jihadist group Hamas. The group has expanded its attacks on Israel since October 7, when Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented invasion of Israel that resulted in an estimated 1,200 deaths, the abduction of about 250 people, and widespread torture, rape, and other atrocities....

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — The leader of Armenia on Wednesday declared his intention to pull out of a Russia-dominated security alliance of several ex-Soviet nations as tensions rise between the two allies. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said his government will decide later when to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, a grouping that includes Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Amid the widening rift with Russia, Armenia earlier froze its participation in the alliance, canceled its involvement in joint military drills and snubbed CSTO summits. Pashinyan said Wednesday for the...

The problem has been traced back to a Chinese supplier. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating an issue involving the authenticity of titanium used in Airbus and Boeing jets after a supplier discovered holes in the metal due to corrosion. This has raised suspicions that a supply chain partner may have falsified documentation, much like the AOG Technics scandal uncovered last year. As first reported by The New York Times, Airbus and Boeing partner Spirit AeroSystems has alleged that titanium used on recently-built aircraft at both planemakers may have been falsely verified, leading the FAA to launch an investigation....

...Such anomalies are known as earthquake precursors, and although researchers are aware of them, it has been difficult to definitively identify a pattern of so-called red flags that could indicate an impending earthquake. This is because of the complexity of precursor interactions and their variability in different earthquakes and geographical regions. However, with every earthquake that researchers analyze using increasingly sophisticated satellite technology, these patterns are slowly emerging.Professor Mehdi Akhoondzadeh of the University of Tehran assessed a variety of satellite data from the run up to and aftermath of two earthquakes that occurred on 6 February 2023 near the border...

Gunmen attacked the United States embassy building in Lebanon on Wednesday morning, according to statements from the U.S. government and the Lebanese army. “At 8:34 a.m. local time, small arms fire was reported in the vicinity of the entrance to the U.S. Embassy. Thanks to the quick reaction of the LAF [Lebanon Armed Forces], ISF [Israel Security Forces], and our Embassy security team, our facility and our team are safe. Investigations are underway and we are in close contact with host country law enforcement,” the embassy said in a statement on X. At 8:34 a.m. local time, small arms fire...

President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took advantage of a major rally held today in Ankara, the Turkish capital, to continue his rampage attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Addressing an audience of thousands of supporters, Erdogan called Netanyahu derogatory names and called on the world to "stop the bloodthirsty thug Netanyahu." "We need to stop this barbarian, thug, and bloodthirsty Netanyahu, who is dragging our region and the entire world into disaster," Erdogan said. He then reiterated Turkey's commitment to the Palestinians and said that Turkey stands by the Palestinian people. "Turkey opposes the oppression, the massacre, and the...

World leaders have been targeted quite frequently this month, and that should deeply alarm all of us. I think that all of this geopolitical instability is a sign that there is far more going on behind the scenes than we are being told. The major powers appear to be making moves in anticipation of what they believe is coming next. Right now, the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is dominating the news cycle, and at this stage we don’t know if that was an accident or not. But as a Twitter user known as “Cillian” has pointed out, there...

In a conversation with the First Vice President, the special assistant to the Russian President stated that, by Putin's order, two advanced aircrafts with special helicopters and 50 professional mountain rescue personnel will be dispatched to Tabriz, Iranian media reported on Sunday overnight.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed on Wednesday that Israel would "set its sights" on Turkey if it succeeded in defeating Hamas in the Gaza Strip, AFP reported. "Do not think that Israel will stop in Gaza," Erdogan told his party lawmakers in the parliament in the capital Ankara. "Unless it's stopped... this rogue and terrorist state will set its sights on Anatolia sooner or later," he added, referring to the large Turkish peninsula also called Asia Minor that comprises more than half of Turkey's territory. "We will continue to stand by Hamas, which fights for the independence of its...