Category: Europe

British Minister for Sports:Istanbul has good chance for 2020 Olympic Games

Robertson visits Turkey to share experience in organizing&developing int. major sporting events.

ANKARA

British Minister for Sports and Tourism Hugh Robertson is visiting Turkey.

British Ambassador in Ankara David Reddaway hosted a reception at the British Embassy residence on Monday in honor of Robertson.

Speaking at the reception, Robertson stressed that the relationship between Turkey and Britain had never been stronger.

Referring to his two-day trip and Turkey’s candidacy to host 2020 Olympic Games, the British minister said, “I will be concentrating on the sporting which binds our countries together. We have just been through the experience of hosting an Olympic Games. We absolutely stand ready to help you in any way that you want.”

Upon a question about what he thinks over Turkey’s 2020 Olympic Games candidacy, Minister Robertson stated that presentation was one of the most important areas in order to win and added, “Istanbul has a very good chance indeed for 2020 Olympic Games.”

Sport and Tourism Minister Robertson was the Olympics Minister when London hosted the 2012 Summer Games.

Robertson came to Turkey to share his experience in organizing and developing international major sporting events and to assess the potential cooperation opportunities between Turkey and Britain.

The British minister is expected to meet Turkish Minister of Youth & Sports Suat Kilic, and Minister of Culture & Tourism Omer Celik during his stay in Ankara on Tuesday.

After completing his talks in Ankara,Robertson will proceed to Istanbul and come together with Mayor of Istanbul Kadir Topbas and the Turkish National Olympics Committee officials.

via British Minister for Sports:Istanbul has good chance for 2020 Olympic Games Anadolu Agency.

February 20, 2013
Leviathan gas sales to Turkey worth $3-4b a year

Leviathan is not big enough for exports by pipeline and LNG, and this could harm Woodside’s plans to build an LNG facility.

17 February 13 17:43, Amiram Barkat and Hillel Koren

A natural gas export contract with Turkey could generate $3-4 billion revenue a year for the Leviathan partners, Noble Energy Inc. (NYSE: NBL), Delek Group Ltd. (TASE: DLEKG), and Ratio Oil Exploration (1992) LP (TASE:RATI.L), according to an analysis of market prices and the quantities of gas under discussion by the parties. Turkey currently pays $11-16 per million BTU for natural gas it buys via pipeline, depending on the contracts with natural gas suppliers.

Turkish daily “Sunday’s Zaman” reports that Turkey’s main gas supplier, Russia, which supplies 55% of the country’s gas, charges $400 million per billion cubic meters, or $11 per million BTU. Azerbaijan, which supplies 10% of the country’s gas, charges $300 million per billion cubic meters, and Iran, which supplies 25% of the country’s gas, charges $505million per billion cubic meters. Turkish complaints about the high price of Iranian gas resulted in the opening of arbitration proceeding in March 2012. Nonetheless, Turkey increased its gas purchases from Iran by 10%, compared with 2011, to 8 BCM, at a cost of over $4 billion.

Talks between Turkish companies and the Leviathan partners mention gas deliveries equal to Turkey’s imports from Iran.

Energy analysts are currently skeptical about a deal, saying that there is nothing to price at this time, and that Egyptian gas affair demonstrates the geopolitical risks of any gas contract. “If the gas flow stops after two years, how will that affect the return on investment and yields? After all, no one can guarantee such large gas sales,” a market source says.

Noble Energy executives have said in the past that any deal with Turkey would require changes in the diplomatic landscape. In addition, any large gas deal with Turkey could have ramifications on liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plans and on plans by Australia’s Woodside Petroleum Ltd. (ASX: WPL) to become a partner in Leviathan for the purpose of building such a facility.

The size of gas discovery at Leviathan and other fields are not big enough for simultaneous exports by pipeline and LNG, even assuming that the Tzemach Committee does not reduce its gas export recommendations, following disappointing results from wells drilled after the report was published.

Market sources believe that that Leviathan partners will soon announce an update on the discovery. Source close to the matter are optimistic about an upward revision from the current estimate of 17 trillion cubic feet of gas. The Leviathan 4 verification well, begun in mid-November, will take four months to complete. The well is targeting strata at a depth of 5,300 meters, including 1,600 meters water depth. The well will later serve as the gas production rig as part of Leviathan’s development plan.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news – www.globes-online.com – on February 17, 2013

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2013

via Leviathan gas sales to Turkey worth $3-4b a year – Globes.

February 19, 2013
Turkey vs. The Louvre: Ankara Renews Its Quest To Recover Antiquities

Reuniting the bust of Hercules with its body was one of the Culture Ministry’s great successes – (Wikimedia / Worldcrunch montage)

By Guillaume Perrier

LE MONDE/Worldcrunch

ISTANBUL – The treasure of Troy is back. The collection of golden jewelry from the ancient city, which had been stolen during the 19th century, was handed back to Turkey by the University of Pennsylvania last September.

The precious jewelry – known as the “Troy gold” – had been looted after the first excavations of Troy by a German archeologist in the 1870s. No one knows if Helen of Troy actually wore the jewels, but Turkey says it belongs to them. “It is only right that they be returned to where they were taken from,” declared Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertugrul Gunay.

These jewels are now set to be displayed in Ankara.

In December, the great Istanbul Archaeology Museum celebrated the return of a mosaic from 194 A.D., depicting Orpheus playing the lyre to calm wild animals. It was stolen in 1998 in Urfa (in ancient times Edessa), near the Syrian border. The mosaic had been auctioned at Christie’s in New York, and bought by the Dallas Art Museum for $85,000.

With those wonders from Asia Minor (current Turkey) more than 3,700 artifacts – statues, frescos, pots, tools and coins – have been recovered since 2007, thanks to an unprecedented campaign led by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The 3,000 year-old Hattusa sphinx, removed from the Hittite imperial city located in the middle of Anatolia, which was on display at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, also made the trip home recently.

But the most spectacular restitution was a bust of Hercules, handed back by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was stolen in 1980 on the site of Perga and sold the next year to the American museum. The bust flew back to Turkey on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plane – who was returning home after the 2011 UN general assembly.

“Turkey had been campaigning for the marble’s return for the past two decades,” he declared, triumphant, as he landed in Ankara. The bust of Hercules could finally be reunited with the rest of his body, on display at the Antalya Museum in southwestern Turkey.

Challenging the museums in court

The Turkish government’s decades-long struggle to recover stolen artifacts has brought a certain number of museums to their knees. But other museums believe the artifacts belong to them, and are refusing to negotiate. This is the case of Paris’ Louvre Museum, whose Islamic wing holds a wall of Ottoman Iznik ceramic tites that Ankara says were stolen from the Istanbul Piyale Pacha Mosque by a French collector. But the Parisian museum argues the tiles were acquired legally.

The Louvre also has 16th century ceramic tiles that were taken from Sultan Selim II’s tomb in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. However, the UNESCO convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was signed in 1970 and doesn’t apply to acquisitions made before that date.

This argument is inconceivable for Murat Suslu, the director of museums for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism: “What if the Turks came, took a stained glass window from Notre-Dame in the 19th century to renovate it and now refused to give it back?”

Priam’s treasure remains on display at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. To get uncooperative countries to hand back their ancient artifacts, Turkey doesn’t hesitate to threaten them with cancelling archeological concessions (especially Germany and France), something these countries call tantamount to blackmail.

Turkey has also tried going to court to get its artifacts back. An Istanbul lawyer recently filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights, in a bid to recover statues taken from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and currently on display at the British Museum.

Read the article in the original language.

Photo by – Wikimedia / Worldcrunch montage

All rights reserved ©Worldcrunch – in partnership with LE MONDE

Crunched by: Leo Tilmont

via Turkey vs. The Louvre: Ankara Renews Its Quest To Recover Antiquities – All News Is Global |.

February 19, 2013
Children fostered by European gay couples will be retrieved

Bakıcı aileye bile devlet para yardımı yapıyorken, gerçek ailesinden maddi sebeplerle alınmaları Avrupa’da çok gerçekçi değil.

by Corinne Pinfold

18 February 2013, 12:04pm

Turkish authorities have begun procedures to remove Turkish children from foreign gay foster parents (Image: Freedom to Marry Site: Flickr)

A campaign has been launched by the Turkish Government to retrieve Turkish children fostered by Christian families in Europe – starting with children fostered by gay and lesbian couples.

According to the Hurriyet Daily, the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag has instructed Turkish international representatives to start the process in the cases of three children fostered by gay couples in Belgium.

The children had been taken from their families by child welfare officers because of abuse claims, or because the families could not financially support their children.

An investigation was launched last month after the Turkish Government estimated that 5,000 such children had been given to Christian foster parents in Europe, rather than being matched to foster parents who share their faith and heritage.

The Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission (TPHRC), which lead the investigation, reported that three of the children had been given to gay and lesbian couples in Belgium.

One child, Yunus, was taken from his family at 6-months-old after allegedly being dropped on the floor by his parents. He is now 9-years-old and lives with a lesbian couple in Belgium. His family had previously applied for his return, but had been rejected by courts.

Turkish authorities have begun legal proceeding to have Yunus and other Turkish children given to gay foster parents returned, citing a violation of human rights and psychological damage done to the child.

Speaking about Yunus’ case Ayhan Sefer Ustun, head of the TPHRC, said: “We don’t condemn that culture, but the child has been given to a foreign culture, to a lesbian family. Even if a child is taken from the [biological] family for the right reasons, he or she should be placed with a family closer to his or her culture.”

He said he was concerned that the children would have their Turkish cultural background and Islamic religion “assimilated” by living with Christian European families.

“The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in a past ruling said that taking a Christian child from his family and giving him to a family of Jehovah’s witnesses was not an appropriate act,” he said. “This is a situation against human rights. It is an assimilation to take a child who has grown up with an Islamic culture to be given to a Christian family without a judicial decision.”

“We have highly successful Turks in Europe. Turkish children could be given to such Turks,” he added.

via Turkey: Children fostered by European gay couples will be retrieved – PinkNews.co.uk.

February 19, 2013
UK Hilary Mantel: Kate Is A ‘Plastic Princess’

Hilary Mantel & Kate

Award winning author Hilary Mantel has launched a scathing attack on the Duchess of Cambridge, describing her as “designed by committee”, in a lecture at the British Museum.

The 60-year-old author, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012, compared Kate to Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana during the lecture entitled Undressing Anne Boleyn.

In it, she said: “It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.

“In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.

“These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions … her only point and purpose being to give birth.”

She also described the Duchess as having a “perfect plastic smile” and said her first official portrait, unveiled last month, revealed “her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to b***** off”.

The lecture for the London Review of Books was given on February 4, but the full version of her speech will be published in the latest edition of the review on Thursday.

Mantel, author of Thomas Cromwell novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, said Kate was not like Anne Boleyn who was a “power player, a clever and determined woman”.

It comes as the Duchess will show off her baby bump for the first time when she visits a project for women recovering from substance dependence.

The 31-year-old will visit Hope House, a project run by Action On Addiction of which she is a patron.

The engagement in Clapham will be the Duchess’ first solo engagement of 2013.

St James’ Palace has also announced the details of her next public engagement on March 5 when she will visit the Lincolnshire town of Grimsby.

Sky News

February 19, 2013
No power can break Turkey off Europe

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu underlined that “just as no power can break off Antep from Aleppo, no power can break off Edirne from Sarajevo, Skopje or even Berlin”, speaking at a meeting on international developments and a tour of horizon in 2013, organized in Istanbul, Anadolu Agency reported.

This is what our cultural demography, economic relations and historic past indicate, Davutoglu stressed.

Touching on Turkey’s international relations, Davutoglu stated that there will remain no country in which Turkey’s friendly and brotherly presence is not felt.

“Back in 2003, Turkey had 94 embassies and 161 foreign representations. At the present time, Turkey has 126 embassies and 221 foreign representations,” Davutoglu also said.

via Turkish FM: No power can break Turkey off Europe – Trend.Az.

February 18, 2013