What Makes People Tick?

Earlier this month, a Turkish young woman was brutally murdered after resisting assault and rape by a stranger. A 20-year old university student on her way home to her family, Özgecan Aslan was aware of the dangers all women face in a world in which men live - she carried pepper spray and she knew to fight back to defend herself - yet also determined to get an education and live her life without fear of other human beings. The burned body of Aslan, who had been missing for two days, was discovered on Feb. 13 in a riverbed in Tarsus in the southern province of Mersin. Ahmet Suphi Altındöken, the 26-year-old bus driver, confessed in a testimony to the prosecutor that he stabbed Aslan to death before cutting off her hands and burning her body. The court arrested Altındöken, while his 50-year-old father, Necmettin Altındöken, and 20-year-old friend, Fatih Gökçe, have also been arrested on charges of being accomplices to the murder.    Turkish women changing names to escape v...

Seeing this image makes me so sad. The Turkish soldiers are RIGHT THERE yet they are standing by while people just across the border are being slaughtered. That is Kobani behind those soldiers, that is how close they are, that is how close reinforcements could be for the Kurdish fighters. And yet they battle on alone, aided by friends from another continent while their neighbours leave them to die. This doesn't just make me sad, it makes me mad and it disgusts me.  Post by I'm against ISIS .

Dutch television news ( RTL Nieuws ) has just reported that a large part of the Kurdish city Kobani in Syria, right on the Turkish border, is now under the control of the Islamic State terrorist group. Volgens een andere functionaris hebben de terroristen enkele gebouwen aan de oostkant van de stad veroverd, ondanks de voortdurende luchtaanvallen door de Amerikanen. Er zijn ook berichten dat IS al een groot deel van de stad, zo niet het grootste deel, in handen heeft. Dat vertelt onder meer de vertaler van correspondent Roel Geeraedts. Die vertaler is een Koerd die uit Kobani komt. Freely translated: One officer says the terrorists have captured several buildings on the east side of town, despite ongoing American air strikes. There are also reports that IS already controls a large part of the town, if not most of the town. There has been fighting around Kobani for some time now, inside it since the last few days. The fighting has been going on for weeks, however now it seems ...

Nederlandse media rapporteert dat een groep van ongeveer honderd Koerden maandagavond het gebouw van de Tweede Kamer bestormd hebben. De Koerdische betogers vragen met hun actie aandacht voor de situatie in Koerdistan. Terroristische organisatie IS (Islamitische Staat / ISIS) voert momenteel aanvallen uit op de Koerdische stad Kobani in Syrië, dichtbij de Turkse grens. De Volkskrant meldt dat veel van de betogers in het gebouw van de Tweede Kamer familie en vrienden hebben in Kobani. Teletekst meldt dat de betogers het gebouw inmiddels verlaten hebben na een gesprek met Kamervoorzitter Anouschka Van Miltenburg. Ook buiten het gebouw van de Tweede Kamer stonden mensen, volgens verschillende bronnen ongeveer 150 (Volkskrant) of "zo’n drie- à vierhonderd man - een eerste inschatting. Een derde daarvan is politieagent" ( NRC.nl ). Den Haag is niet de enige plek waar gedemonstreerd werd. Koerdische betogers verzamelden ook in onder andere Wenen, Bern, Kopenhagen, Stockholm, ...

The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has conducted an extensive survey in seven Muslim-majority countries -- Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- looking at Tunisia as the birthplace of the Arab Spring and how happenings in Tunisia effect other Arab countries. The study itself is very interesting - read it as a PDF here  - however what caught my eye was a January 2014 article by the Pew Research Center (using UoM's data)  looking at the way MEN prefer women to dress in public places in the above-mentioned countries.

This blog has featured posts about Gobekli Tepe in Turkey before. As ancient locations go, this is one of the most fascinating sites in the entire world! While we don't browse the web daily looking for news on all topics that interest us, today's article falls right smack in the 'interesting news' category! Owen Jarus writes for NBC News: "Ancient blades made of volcanic rock that were discovered at what may be the world's oldest temple suggest that the site in Turkey was the hub of a pilgrimage  that attracted a cosmopolitan group of people some 11,000 years ago.  The researchers matched up about 130 of the blades, which would have been used as tools, with their source volcanoes, finding people would have come from far and wide to congregate at the ancient temple site, Gobekli Tepe, in southern Turkey. The blades are made of obsidian, a volcanic glass rich with silica, which forms when lava cools quickly." Source :   'World's Oldest temple...

Copy of a short piece I wrote for another blog of mine. First published 12-06-2011 Happened across an article in the Daily Mail today from back in 2009 that caught my fancy. In short, it describes the find of a bunch of carved ancient stones long buried at Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey / Kurdistan. This site predates other ancient sites such as Stonehenge or the Pyramids by several thousands of years, meaning it is the oldest such site that has been uncovered to date. Not only does this site teach us amazing new things about our (humanity´s) past, we also learn more about the region, the practices and possible lifestyle and beliefs of the people alive at the time, and oh as an afterthought - reshapes what we thought we knew to be true about human development. Isn´t is just awesome when history, religion and science come together! Some quotes from the article: Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old. That means it was b...