In a major setback to Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has sought to undermine the country’s long secular tradition, the opposition coalition candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu won a big victory in a rerun of the mayoral election, after Erdoğan’s ruling party had his earlier narrow victory annulled because of alleged improprieties.

Shortly after initial results pointing to a landslide win for the opposition coalition candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, emerged on Sunday evening, the candidate of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Binali Yıldırım, conceded and congratulated his rival.

The repeat election, designed to undo İmamoğlu’s narrow surprise win in the 31 March contest, was an unprecedented test for both Turkey’s fragile democratic institutions and Erdoğan’s political future.
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The president issued his congratulations to İmamoğlu on Twitter after initial results showed that with 99% of ballots counted the People’s Republican party (CHP) candidate had increased his lead in March, of 13,000 votes, to an astonishing 777,000, or 54%.

Crowded parties broke out on Istanbul’s main shopping streets and in liberal neighbourhoods.
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İmamoğlu was embraced by voters for a platform which focused on bringing people together across the city’s religious, class and ethnic divides, and was able to paint his new campaign as a battle for the future of Turkish democracy itself.

Turkey still has some way to go to reverse course and head in a more democratic direction. But this is a hopeful sign.

Agnes Callamard is the UN’s special rapporteur who issued a scathing report about the Saudi Arabian government’s involvement in the brutal murder of reporter Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, saying that there was evidence of high-level involvement in what was a pre-meditated murder and that the role of crown Mohammed bin Salman’s needed to be investigated.

The World‘s reporter Shirin Jaafari scored an interview with Callamard and asked her about the evidence that she saw and how she arrived at her conclusions. Callamard was remarkably frank and forthcoming and the seven-minute interview is illuminating and also damning in its portrayal of how the Saudi government behaved.

Callamard describes what she heard on the audio recordings that were obtained by the Turkish government, where the Saudis casually discuss the planned murder. It is quite extraordinary how coldly and clinically the Saudi officials discussed the planned murder.

Seth Harp is a journalist and like many white people, was not quite aware of how militarized the US immigration system has become because on his return from his frequent trips abroad, he is usually waived through immigration after being asked a few perfunctory questions. That is, until he returned recently from an assignment in Mexico and was subject to ‘secondary screening’, that he dewcribes as “a quasi-custodial law enforcement process that takes place in the Homeland Security zone of the airport.” He was interrogated for hours by the Customs and Border Protection agency that has become a gun-toting quasi-military force, and they ransacked his phone and laptop after demanding that he give them the passwords.
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Marianne Williamson is one of the two dozen or so people running for the Democratic party nomination for president. I had never heard of her until she announced her candidacy and knew little about her. This week she created some controversy by making anti-vaccination comments. As she probably desired, this brought her some publicity and this article by Shira Feder gives us some background on this person and one thing you can say about her is that she is not your run-of-the-mill politician. No, sirree! She seems to be some kind of new age guru spouting spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
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Roy Moore, the controversial former chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court who seems to have had a life-long penchant for very young girls, news of which contributed to his loss to Democrat Doug Jones for the senate seat in 2018, has said that he will run again, much to the consternation of Donald Trump and the Republican party leadership who had thought that this was a senate seat that they would easily recapture in 2020 with any extreme Republican candidate who was not tainted by suspected pedophilia. That seems to be the only line that they draw.

They have vowed to try and stop him from winning the Republican nomination in the primary but I was struck by a comment from one of the current Republican senators who was appalled by the prospect of having Moore as a colleague. Sen. Martha McSally (R-Arizona) was quoted as saying, “Give me a break. This place has enough creepy old men,”

Who are these creepy old senators? Inquiring minds want names, Martha!