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Blackburn woman in child custody battle in Turkey

By Emma Cruces » Reporter

A BLACKBURN woman is locked in a child custody battle with her estranged husband in Turkey.

HAPPIER TIMES Mehmet Baki Sakaraglu and Anisa with son Amani

Anisa Khansia, 29, was visiting 22-month-old son Amani’s grandparents when a bitter fight over the child broke out.

Friends and relatives of Miss Khansia in Blackburn claim husband Mehmet Baki Sakaraglu tried to snatch the child.

But Mr Sakaraglu, who has appeared on Britain’s Got Talent under the stage name of Ali Baba, has spoken out over the battle to Turkish newspapers, giving a different version of events.

The reports claim he feels the Turkish authorities should review custody as Ms Khansia is not a fit parent and that he has seen ‘inappropriate’ pictures of her on the Internet Friends of Miss Khansia said Turkish authorities had prevented her from leaving the country until the matter is settled in court.

The Foreign Office has been notified of the dispute. A spokesman said the matter was ‘contentious’ and that a police investigation was ongoing.

The partner of Ms Khansia’s cousin, Jeannine Astley, said the family had been offering support over the phone and some had travelled to be with her.

She said: “We don’t know how long this is going to drag on for.

“This was just supposed to be a holiday where Amani could see his relatives.

“She did the same thing last year and everything was fine. This time all hell has broken loose”.

Miss Astley said the couple married three years ago after meeting on holiday a year before.

Miss Khansia visited him in Turkey regularly before the couple wed in 2008.

Mr Sakaraglu came to Britain after the wedding, but her family said their relationship was under strain from early on.

They are said to have separated soon after Amani’s birth.

Miss Khansia is the daughter of a man labelled Blackburn’s ‘Mr Big’ for his drug dealing.

In 2005, she was ordered to pay back £45,000 of ill-gotten gains as she owned a house in Tintern Crescent, Blackburn, which had been bought with laundered drugs money.

She was jailed for six months for the offence.

Miss Astley said the prison sentence had ‘scared’ her and encouraged her to turn her life around.

She said: “Anisa got a job as a receptionist and settled down. She wanted to be married. She wanted to build a good life for her child after everything she had been through.”

via Blackburn woman in child custody battle in Turkey (From Blackburn Citizen).

July 11, 2011
Britain seeks to boost defense cooperation with Turkey

Ümit Enginsoy

ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News

Despite loose defense industry ties between Turkey and the UK, the British Aerospace Systems wants to develop, produce and export a combat ship with Turkey, according to an executive

The BAE Systems’ Global Combat Ship program is being developed to deliver multirole ships with anti-submarine, air defence and general purpose variants.

Britain, the world’s second largest defense exporter after the United States, but which has little presence in Turkey, has launched a major effort for joint manufacture and joint export to third countries of defense equipment with Ankara, a senior British industry official said Thursday.

Britain’s defense exports worldwide surpassed 7 billion pounds in 2009, taking a nearly 20 percent share of the global market. But its activities in Turkey, with a flourishing defense industry, in the last 15 years were limited to the production of electronic warfare systems for Turkish F-16 fighter planes by the American arm of BAE Systems, the largest defense company in Britain and Europe and the second-largest in the world.

Also the American arms of the same company has a 49 percent stake in FNSS, a top Turkish armored vehicles firm, which earlier this year signed a $600 million deal for the export of the Pars, an 8X8 wheeled vehicle, in the largest ever single export contract in Turkey’s history.

The government of British Prime Minister David Cameron, in power since last year, unofficially has designated Turkey, together with Brazil and India, as top potential strategic partners in the defense industry.

During a visit to Ankara in January, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox strongly backed Turkey’s membership in the European Union and pledged to bolster defense industry cooperation.

During IDEF-11 earlier this year, Turkey’s largest defense fair in Istanbul, Alan Garwood, group business development director for BAE Systems, said his company wanted to partner more with the Turkish defense industry.

Net exporter of defense equipment

“BAE Systems would be very pleased to collaborate further with Turkey and assist with the country’s aspiration to become a net exporter of defense and security equipment,” Garwood said on May 10.

The company has considerable experience of assisting in the development of indigenous defense capabilities in markets around the world. In terms of near-term defense collaboration, Garwood identified the naval sector as a good opportunity for Turkey and Britain to work closely together.

“Turkey has ambitions and aspirations for the development of its local defense industry. By 2023, it wants to become a net exporter of defense goods,” a senior official from BAE Systems told Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review here Thursday.

“BAE Systems has significant expertise in working with host countries. A commitment between Britain and Turkey to form more business partnership on Global Combat Ships could potentially be a specific opportunity,” said the British official.

The Global Combat Ship, being developed by BAE Systems, is a future vision of what is now known as frigates in present navies. It is a multirole warship designed to be offered in anti-submarine warfare, air defense and general purpose variants.

Turkey presently is working to design the features and specifications of its future naval vessels. The British company’s Global Combat Ship is likely to face strong rivals, including U.S. and Italian firms in a future competition.

BAE Systems also is a partner of the pan-European Eurofigher consortium, whose other partners include Italian, German and Spanish companies and which makes the European Typhoon fighter planes. Eurofighter seeks to include Turkey in the development and manufacture of the aircraft’s new versions.

via Britain seeks to boost defense cooperation with Turkey – Hurriyet Daily News.

July 8, 2011
Hussein Chalayan: The man of the moment

A major new exhibition explores the extraordinary work of Hussein Chalayan. Susannah Frankel celebrates a bright and unorthodox star

Monday, 4 July 2011

A mechanical dress in action

This looks set to be quite a month for the fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, who has long remained under the radar, relatively speaking, at least – he is both proudly individual and uncompromising.

Tomorrow at Les Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the largest retrospective of his work to date opens to the public. Pieces hitherto unseen away from the catwalk include the remote control dress from Before Minus Now (spring/summer 2000) and looks from Between (spring/summer 1998), which took as its starting point different aspects of worship, encompassing everything from convent girl to covered Muslim.

To coincide with this a new monograph will be published, which is unusually personal and compiled by the designer himself. Chalayan has painstakingly edited down his drawings from many thousands kept in binders in his studio. They provide an intriguing way into his process. No less revealing are family photographs. He has always stressed the importance of his background, and his ancestry in particular. And so there’s an engagement photograph of his mother and father; his aunt, cousins and grandmother all also have their moment in the sun. Chalayan’s own portraits follow his life path: as a child growing up in his bedroom in Cyprus; as a young man bearing an uncanny resemblance to a 1950s pin-up; while studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in London, from where he graduated in 1993, and rocking an equally retro look; and later, in his signature sweater and jeans but with rather less hair, as an established designer, back in his homeland again.

Here, too, are Chalayan’s art works. He is very much a pluralist – when he was at Saint Martin’s it was a more integrated place and the crossover between art and fashion especially was hugely productive. The critic Andrew Graham Dixon once said that Chalayan’s work was “as close to contemporary art as you can get”.

As well as running his own fashion business, the designer creates installations, sculpture and film, which he sells to collectors around the world.

Then, of course, there are the clothes, from carefully chosen fashion editorials – gathered from publications including The New Yorker (Richard Avedon), American Vogue (Mario Testino), V Magazine (Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin), Dazed & Confused (Sofia Coppola) and more – to catwalk imagery. It is well known that Chalayan’s runway presentations have about as much in common with anything straightforward or conventional as chalk does with cheese. Consider One Hundred And Eleven (spring/summer 2007), with mechanical dresses that travelled through decades of fashion history in front of the audience’s very eyes, or Panoramic (autumn/winter 1998) that took as its starting point nothing more obvious than Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and, through mirrors and clothing that fused ethnic detailing with uniform, the limits of language and thought.

Given that Chalayan’s shows – and indeed his ideas more generally – are ambitious to say the very least, it is perhaps not surprising that the fact that he also makes beautiful clothes has at times been overlooked – and even upstaged. For Readings (spring/summer 2008), bodices were embedded with radiating Swarowski crystals (the company has long supported Chalayan and is a title sponsor of the Paris exhibition). In Ventriloquy (spring/summer 2001), clothing made out of sugar glass was duly smashed to pieces centre stage. Most famous of all is the table skirt from Afterwords (autumn/winter 2000). It’s small wonder, given their spectacular nature, that such show pieces have received more attention than even the designer himself might wish for. “The number of times I’ve seen that table skirt,” he once said of the latter. “I mean, I love that piece, but it’s only the tiniest part of what we’ve done. People think that creativity and commerce don’t go together in my brand, but that’s a misconception because we have always – always – made clothes that you can wear.”

More pictures – of striped wide-legged palazzo pants, say, in Dolce Far Niente (spring/summer 2010) later worn by Lady Gaga on uncharacteristically soignée form, and a floral print dress from Sakoku (spring/summer 2010) are testimony, if ever any were needed, that Chalayan is a rare talent where this, too, is concerned.

Of course, Chalayan is no stranger to the gallery setting – he had shows at both the Lisson Gallery and Spring Studios in London only last year. The Paris exhibition, meanwhile, started life in 2009 at the Design Museum in the British capital and has since travelled to Tokyo and Istanbul, adapting to its setting in each instance. Sitting in a café not far from his Shoreditch studio 10 days before the opening, he says it is unprecedented, primarily due to its focus on clothes. This, after all, is specifically a fashion museum and work will be displayed in a more traditional way and predominantly in vitrines for the first time. “It’s good for me to become part of that fashion institution discourse,” says Chalayan, before going on to point out also: “The show’s open in Paris all summer – a lot of people are going to see it.”

And that is nothing if not timely. Earlier this year, the designer changed the name of his label simply to Chalayan, dropping his first name, he argues, because it facilitates recognition in a heavily branded world and because:”I like the way it looks”.

As well as the main line there will be Chalayan Grey, a collection of more accessibly priced designs aimed at a younger audience, and Chalayan Red, which will only be available in Japan.

As befits a designer with his eye on more clearly commercial concerns, meanwhile, Chalayan’s first fragrance, Airborne – he came up with the concept and the packaging, Comme des Garcons with the juice – is also set to launch. Packaged in a bottle that is engraved with a vintage Hussein Chalayan print of the Nicosia shore and skyline (the same appears in colour on the inside of the box), even this exemplifies the unusually autobiographical and narrative touch that characterises so much of his output.

“Because of my family life when I was a child, I moved around and readapted to new scenarios, and smell marked a big part of these shifts in environment,” states the designer, whose parents separated when he was still young and who moved between London with his father and Cyprus with his mother from there on in.

“After selecting different elements such as neroli, lemon and lentiscus from Cyprus, I proposed an imaginary scenario as to how these ingredients could incur change during and after an air journey from Mediterranean Cyprus to a London urban setting.”

As for the name? Chalayan’s continued interest in flight has its roots here, too. “I spent so much time on planes as a child.”

Hussein Chalayan: Fashion Narratives is at Les Arts Decoratifs, Paris, July 7 to November 21, www.lesartsdecroatifs.fr; Hussein Chalayan, by Hussein Chalayan, with contributions by Judith Clark, Susannah Frankel, Pamela Golbin, Emily King, Rebecca Lowthorpe and Sarah Mower is published by Rizzoli; Hussein Chalayan, Airborne, launches at London’s Dover Street Market later this month.

July 4, 2011
EDL Jewish division leader Roberta Moore quits

By Jennifer Lipman, June 29, 2011

The hardline activist at the forefront of the “Jewish Division” of the extreme right-wing English Defence League has announced that she does not wish to be a part of it any longer because of Nazi elements within it.

Roberta Moore, who has led the Jewish Division since it was launched more than a year ago, was accused earlier this month of being a divisive figure in the EDL.

Ms Moore had attempted to co-ordinate her efforts with those of the far-right American Jewish Task Force, whose leader Victor Vancier has been imprisoned for terrorism offences. The move, in February, was heavily criticised by the EDL leadership.

In a statement which she posted on Facebook, the Brazilian-born Ms Moore said she had been offered work on “an international level” elsewhere and so had decided to step down from the Jewish Division.

Although she described the EDL as “doing a fantastic job” she said the party had been hijacked by elements who wanted to use it “for their own Nazi purposes”.

Ms Moore said she still supported the EDL leaders and “all the genuine patriots out there who struggle to get their voices heard” but added that she no longer wished to be a part of it.

“I sincerely hope that the leaders will get the strength to squash the Nazis within,” she said.

“They will destroy this movement if allowed to remain.”

Mark Gardner, from the Community Security Trust, said: “This latest development shows, yet again, why Jews should not be involved in such circles.”

www.thejc.com, June 30 2011

July 1, 2011
Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media

By Jay Janson

27 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency. A monolithic unified slant media cartel restricts reports to indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters by Syrian government

Now that the West’s war on Gaddafi is going well, American news commentators can in rare moments proudly admit that the CIA is heavily involved. No so, when if comes to Syria. It’s too early. The public has not been yet been properly taught to hate Syria’s President Assad sufficiently.

The imperialist media cartel that controls what news is selected and how and with what intention it shall be broadcasted has done its best to demonize Assad. How? Simple! They just keep repeating day in day out that Syrian government forces are shooting and massacring protesters, period. They don’t say anything else. That’s it. There is nothing else happening. When it is necessary to admit that police and soldiers are being ambushed and killed, a cover story comes with it, like, ‘it is suspected that they were killed by defecting police and military.’

This amazing great cartel of Pentagon/CIA fed media conglomerates, which seems to have the great majority of the basically indifferent population of the West in tow, is effortlessly running its usual cascade of disinformation, half-truths and propaganda preparing justification for military intervention as previously in the cases of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran.

However, “The plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that well. It succeeded in persuading public opinion that the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government. Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it, notably Tel Aviv” surmises Thierry Meyssan in “The Plan to Destabilize Syria”, Voltaire Network, Lebanon, 6/13/11.

A few scholarly sites on the Internet always manage to fill in what is intentionally blacked out in Pentagon counseled and fed commercial mass media of the Western pseudo-democracies. Here, Michael Chossudovsky, consultant with a half-dozen UN agencies and publisher of Global Research out of Canada tell us:

“What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency.
This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. “We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country,” she said.

Action against Syria is part of a “military roadmap”, a sequencing of military operations. According to former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark–the Pentagon had clearly identified Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon as target countries of a US-NATO intervention:
‘[The] Five-year campaign plan [included]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan’ (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark) In Winning Modern Wars (page 130) General Wesley Clark states the following:

‘The objective is to destabilize the Syrian State and implement “regime change” through the covert support of an armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist militia.
The reports on civilian deaths are used to provide a pretext and a justification for humanitarian intervention under the principle “Responsibility to Protect”.’

Media Disinformation

What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters. Press reports confirm, however, from the outset of the protest movement an exchange of gunfire between armed insurgents and the police, with casualties reported on both sides.

The insurrection started in mid March in the border city of Daraa, which is 10 km from the Jordanian border. The Daraa “protest movement” on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)
Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.

What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement” The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War, By Michael Chossudovsky

One would be naive to believe that the century of brutal occupation of the Arab lands of Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco by France and those of Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Somaliland, Aden, and Yemen by the British, with both occupying Libya after W.W.II, that British M16 and and the French Secret Service would not be indispensable for the johnny-come-lately America empire and its CIA. But one would have to be even more naive to believe the excellent secret service of Israel, Mossad, at war with the Arab world since 1948 was not playing a key role in Syria and Libya, two adamant adversaries of the State of Israel. Here below is some background.

Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, 6/19/11
https://www.voltairenet.org/The-plan-to-destabilize-Syria

“A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, in 1982, ” Written by Oded Yinon, then a senior advisor for Israel’s foreign ministry, the essay explicitly calls for breaking up the Arab states of the region along ethnic and sectarian lines. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas… is Israel’s primary target on the eastern front in the long run.”

“In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines… is possible,” he writes. “So, three states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”

As for Egypt, Yinon calls for breaking the country up into “distinct geographical regions.” The establishment of an independent Coptic-Christian state in Upper Egypt, he writes, “alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government…seems inevitable in the long run.”

Yinon goes on to mention Sudan in similar terms, describing it as “the most torn-apart state in the Arab-Muslim world today…built upon four groups hostile to each other: an Arab-Muslim Sunni minority which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, pagans and Christians.”

According to Mazloum, political maneuvering in recent years by Israel and the western powers – both overt and covert – appears to conform to this strategy of balkanization.

“Israel and the U.S. have both helped break up Iraq by encouraging the emergence of an independent Kurdish state and fostering Sunni-Shiite division,” he said. “And in Sudan, Earlier this month, Mohamed Abbas, a leading member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Coalition Council (RCC), likewise warned of an ongoing “conspiracy” aimed at breaking Egypt into three petty states.

“The Zionist plan to politically fragment the Arab Middle East so as to keep Arab states in a perpetual state of instability and weakness has been well known for the last three decades,” Gamal Mazloum, retired Egyptian major-general and expert on defense issues, told IPS.

“The western campaign against Libya … was launched with the aim of breaking Libya; Libya could be split in two, with Gaddafi staying on in the west of the country and a revolutionary government loyal to the western powers in control of the east, Mohamed al-Sakhawi, leading member of Egypt’s as-yet-unlicensed Arabic Unity Party, told IPS.”

The satellite generated media conglomerate cartel’s unified single angle presentation of world events is really difficult for progressive alternate media to dare challenge as slanted. Its deceptions become truths to everyone except the skeptical. Most progressive magazines and Internet sites and newsletters depend on keeping their less politically educated liberal readership.

What this writer suggests is that progressives at least identify Network news and conglomerate owned print media in some manner as to warn their liberal readership to be wary of giant major media’s ownership and agenda. Warn that what is being projected in between commercials is the very same agenda of our now well understood, Military Industrial Financial Complex and the three branches of government it firmly controls.

Notice how the general term media appears, even in the scholarly investigative journalism quoted in this article. Would it not carry more awareness to the reader if it was more carefully defined as ‘imperialist media.’ For what is referred to by peoples historian journalists in fighting deception and war mongering is not media per se, which must include all media, including more inclusive foreign media and U.S. alternate media containing investigative reporting in historical context without a war justifying agenda.

Someone surely can come up with something besides ‘imperialist media’ to describe the monolithic output of all the media conglomerates of an increasingly moronic U.S. media cartel with overseas linkage.

Are we never to hear of the mass homicidal crimes of the CIA until files are forced open by law decades too late? Progressives have to move on this, or lose credibility among Socialists and anti-capitalists.

Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalReserch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, DissidentVoice, HistoryNewsNetwork, are among those who have republished his articles.

www.countercurrents.org, 27 June 2011

June 30, 2011
Clarke: Homeowners ‘Can Stab Burglars’

The Justice Secretary has said householders will be able to stab burglars without fear of prosecution under new legislation guaranteeing their right to defend themselves.

Ken Clarke was speaking ahead of the Justice Bill debate in the Commons.

He said an act of Parliament will be used to “clarify” the existing legal right to use “reasonable force” against intruders.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Clarke said: “We will make it quite clear you can hit a burglar with a poker if he’s in your house and you have a perfect defence when you do so.

“If an old lady finds she’s got an 18-year-old burgling her house and she picks up a kitchen knife and sticks it in him, she has not committed a criminal offence, and we will make that clear.”

Prime Minister David Cameron has promised that the new Justice Bill would “put beyond doubt that homeowners and small shopkeepers who use reasonable force to defend themselves or their properties will not be prosecuted”.

Mr Clarke accepted that the defence of reasonable force already exists, but said: “Given that doubts are expressed, we are going to clarify that.

“It is quite obvious that people are entitled to use whatever force is necessary to protect themselves and their homes.

“What they are not entitled to do is go running down the road chasing them or shooting them in the back when they are running away or to get their friends together and go and beat them up.

“We all know what we mean when we say a person has an absolute right to defend themselves and their home and reasonable force.

“Nobody should prosecute and nobody should ever convict anybody who takes these steps.”

Mr Cameron’s official spokesman said: “The objective is to put beyond doubt the fact that home-owners and small shopkeepers who use reasonable force to protect themselves or their property should be able to do that without being prosecuted.”

It is quite obvious that people are entitled to use whatever force is necessary to protect themselves and their homes.

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke

Sky News

June 30, 2011