Category: America

Legislation Could Decide NYC’s Taxi of Tomorrow

Posted By: Spencer Winans

In late October of 2010, Ford Motor Company announced the end of the Crown Victoria—which meant the over 13,000 NYC taxi cabs, most of which are Crown Vics, would soon be replaced by a new model and a new fleet. Enter the “Taxi of Tomorrow” competition and its finalists: Nissan, Ford and Karsan.

Karsan, a Turkish car manufacturer, has the only wheel chair accessible model of the finalists. And if a new bill proposed by State Assemblyman Micah Kellner—that would make all new NYC taxi cabs wheel chair accessible by October 1st, 2014—is passed today, Karsan will be shipping to us our “taxi of tomorrow.”

Assemblyman Micah Kellner, who previously championed the privatization of wheel chair accessible taxis, has since taken matters into his own hands with his proposed legislation—a direct response to lack of progress made by NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).

According to Gothamist, “65.5% of responders liked or loved [Karsan’s] airy design versus 38% for the Ford design and 42.4 for the Nissan look.”

via nypress

April 13, 2011
US government shut down averted before midnight deadline
U.S. President Barack Obama and congressional leaders reached a last-minute budget deal, averting a government shutdown that would have idled hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
President Obama poses for photographers in the Blue Room at the White House in Washington after averting government shutdown after a deal was made between Republican and Democrat lawmakers. Photo: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

With a midnight deadline looming for a government closure, the hard-fought compromise between Obama’s Democrats and opposition Republicans requires lawmakers to approve stopgap funding to keep federal agencies running into next week until the budget agreement can be formally enacted.

A shutdown — the first in more than 15 years — would have meant furloughs for much of the federal work force, suspension of some key government services and the closing of many national monuments and parks, while potentially undermining the U.S. economic recovery.

But the biggest incentive for a deal may have been the risks that failure would have posed for Obama, his fellow Democrats and the Republicans amid signs of public frustration with the rancorous budget fight as the 2012 presidential election campaign gathers steam.

“Tomorrow, I’m pleased to announce that the Washington Monument as well as the entire federal government will be open for business,” a smiling Obama said in a late-night appearance at the White House.

After days of tense negotiations and brinkmanship, Republican lawmakers said agreement was reached on $37.8 billion (£23 billion) in spending cuts in a budget for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

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“I am pleased Senator Reid and I and the White House have been able to come to an agreement that will in fact cut spending and keep our government open,” U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner told reporters.

Obama’s aides and U.S. lawmakers had struggled for days to hammer out a deal, making the threat of a government shutdown look ever more possible. The two sides even had a hard time agreeing on what issues were holding up an agreement..

Democrats said they were at odds over federal funding for birth control. Republicans said spending cuts were the issue.

The Senate on Friday night hurriedly approved a short-term funding bill to keep the government running until the longer budget plan can be enacted into law sometime next week.

The House was to approve the stopgap measure later and it will then go to Obama to sign into law.

Without an agreement, money to operate the federal government for the next six months would have run out at midnight on Friday and agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service would begin a partial shutdown.

Despite the apparent resolution of the impasse, the bitter political fight raised questions about the ability of Obama and a divided U.S. Congress to deal with bigger issues looming down the road, from raising the federal debt ceiling to reining in budget deficits.

“They’ve got to be laughing at us right now” in China, said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. “How terrific that the United States of America can’t make a decision.”

The leadership of the world’s lone remaining superpower has been consumed for days by the budgetary infighting that could bring large swathes of government to a standstill.
April 9, 2011
Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide

ANKARA—Turkey slammed a Friday Argentine court ruling, which said the Turkish state committed Genocide against the Armenians.

Judge Norberto Oyarbide (center) with other judicial panelists

The Turkish foreign ministry on Monday said the ruling is an example of how legal systems are abused by “extreme nationalists” belonging to the Armenian Diaspora. The ministry said the decision was based on unserious accusations and it destabilizes Turkey’s efforts to mend ties with Armenia, reported the Associated Press.

Armenia’s Ambassador to Argentina, Vladimir Karmirshalyan, on Saturday said the Argentine judge upheld the “the right to the truth.”

An Argentine judge ruled Friday that “the Turkish state committed the crime of genocide against the Armenian people” between 1915 and 1923.

The 100-plus page ruling, which was read Friday, resulted from a case presented 10-year ago by the Luisa Hairapetian Fund. Throughout the proceedings, which lasted 120 months, the court has heard grueling testimony from Genocide survivors, their families and other members of the community.

The plaintiff, Gregorio Hairapetian was joined by his family, attorneys for the Luisa Hairapetian Foundation, the Argentine press corps, as well as the Armenian National Committee of Argentina members and the community at large.

In his ruling Friday, Judge Norberto Oyarbide said that Turkey should help an Armenian descendant living in Argentina learn the fate of more than 50 of his relatives who disappeared nearly a century ago.

Oyarbide used as a basis for his ruling the 2007 Argentine law that declares April 23 as a day of “solidarity and respect” in memory of the Armenian Genocide.

via Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide | Asbarez Armenian News.

April 5, 2011
Turkey Rising

BY J.E. DYER

Turkey’s pulsating new foreign policy is so multifaceted it may soon run out of Turks to keep it going. With “tectonic” geopolitical shifts creating new opportunities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is executing a pretty tectonic plan of his own. The unmistakable themes are regional leadership, Islamic-world leadership, and putting Turkey in the broker’s seat for as many points of conflict as possible.

The Turkish effort in Libya is gathering steam, with the dispatch of warships to enforce the embargo and the visit to Ankara on Monday of a Qaddafi envoy, reportedly in Turkey to discuss a truce. Turkey is being billed overtly as a “mediator,” perhaps in part because NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh-Rasmussen was also in Ankara Monday.

The Erdogan government may have no better luck brokering a Libyan truce than theAfrican Union had the week before last, but Turkey is forging ahead in the political-momentum sweepstakes. On 31 March, Erdogan became the first Turkish prime minster ever to visit the Kurds of Iraq. While in Iraqi Kurdistan, he opened a Turkish consulate in Irbil and presided at the opening ceremony for a new commercial airport.

With this VIP outreach, Erdogan hopes to put Turkey on offense and assume leadership on one of the region’s principal sources of destabilization. Besides Turkey, Syria and Iran are both concerned about restive Kurdish minorities, especially while their central governments are under threat. Opening a unique dialogue with the Iraqi Kurds – who are invested with the state trappings of a semi-autonomous government – is a way for Turkey to gain leverage over the other Kurd-troubled nations. Erdogan naturally hopes to preempt his own Kurdish insurgents as well, with a view to border security and the 2011 national elections.

There may also be an element in this of preempting Iran, which has been caught in recent weeks promoting an Islamist insurgency in neighboring Azerbaijan, a client of Turkey and the U.S. Turkey and Iran want to retain influence with each other, but they are competitors in their visions for regional (and global Islamic) leadership; both are working harder right now to seize separate, sometimes conflicting opportunities than to butter each other up. It was as a participant in this competition that Turkey, in March, confiscated an Iranian arms shipment bound for Syria and went on to report the breach – quite officiously – to the UN.

But wait – there’s more. Turkey achieved a military first last week, hosting atrilateral exercise with the armies of Afghanistan and Pakistan. NATO is pleased to see this as a helpful outreach on behalf of the alliance. Turkey sees it as an exercise in regional and Islamic-state leadership –and as a declaration of political independence, like the Turkish armed forces’ series of drills with China (see here andhere), and the Turks’ intransigence on their demands regarding the purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the U.S. Turkey wants avionics source codes, which the U.S., in spite of pressure from Britain and Israel, decided in 2009 not to hand over to any F-35 customer. In late March, Turkey suspended its F-35 purchase until the source codes are forthcoming, which neither Israel nor Britain has felt in a position to do.

On Monday, President Abdullah Gul arrived in Indonesia for the first visit of a Turkish president since 1995 (and only the third since Indonesian independence in 1945). Among the ties he seeks to strengthen are Turkish arms exports – to both Indonesia and Malaysia, the most predominantly Muslim of the Southeast Asian nations. Notably, the arms exports in prospect are weighted heavily toward armored fighting vehicles, something both nations already have in abundance. But Turkey hopes to expand arms cooperation to include the joint development of warships and artillery weapons.

U.S. analysts would once have considered this a disquieting development, but perhaps we can congratulate ourselves that we no longer overreact to these things.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative. She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

hotair.com, 4 April 2011

April 5, 2011
Los Angeles- Istanbul Connection

For Immediate Release

18th Street Arts Center Project Room
1629 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404
Contact: Amber Jones
310-453-3711 Ext 108
[email protected]

project site: http://losangelesistanbul.weebly.com/

“Los Angeles- Istanbul Connection”

May 7-30, 2011

Opening reception: Saturday, May 7th, 6-9pm

Artists: Insel Inal Saliha Kasap, Elif Oner, Ozan Oganer, Alper Sen

Carol Es, Gul & Arzu, Marcie Kaufman, Blair Townsend

Curated by: Arzu Arda Kosar & Saliha Kasap

“Los Angeles- Istanbul Connection” features work by five Turkish and five Los Angeles artists at the 18th Street Arts Center Project Room, May 7-30, 2011. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, photography, video and installations by Los Angeles based artists Carol Es, Gul Cagin, Marcie Kaufman, Arzu Arda Kosar, and Blair Townsend along with Istanbul based artists Insel Inal, Saliha Kasap, Elif Oner, Ozan Oganer and Alper Sen, The opening reception will take place on May 7th, 6-9pm.

The exhibition is a curatorial collaboration between Saliha Kasap, the Istanbul based artist and coordinator of Sanat Limani (aka Antrepo 5) in Istanbul, Turkey, and Arzu Arda Kosar, a resident artist at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA.

Inspired by the myriad of similarities between Istanbul and Los Angeles art worlds, both of which boast increasingly vibrant art scenes that may lack an art market akin to Europe or New York but counter balance it with the experimental and exciting work created in the absence of it, Kasap and Kosar curated a show that brings together artists from Istanbul, Turkey and Los Angeles at the 18th Street Arts Center.

For “Los Angeles-Istanbul Connection” Kasap selected works by five contemporary Turkish artists currently emerging in the ever more compelling contemporary art scene in Istanbul. Kosar juxtaposed these works with five local counterparts who work in a similar vein. As Alper Sen’s video documentary on discarded material is in dialogue with Blair Townsend’s rug made of superfluous plastic toys, Ozan Oganer’s lace sculpture corresponds with Carol Es’ work that incorporates elements of sewing. Insel Inal’s socially engaged photo series share common threads with the collaborative work Gul & Arzu. Saliha Kasap’s insect-like cityscape photo collages relate to Marcie Kaufman’s disorienting industrial images, and Elif Oner’s videos depicting dreamlike, mystical, timeless spaces corresponds with land art by Australian artist Andrew Rogers whose work is concurrently on display at the main gallery.

For more information on “Los Angeles- Istanbul Connection” please contact Arzu Arda Kosar at [email protected] or or visit http://losangelesistanbul.weebly.com/

www.arzuardakosar.org
http://losangelesistanbul.weebly.com/

Arzu’s upcoming events:

April 2, 2-5pm For the Birds @ Audubon Center at Debs Park

May 7, 6-9pm Los Angeles Istanbul Connection @ 18th Street Arts Center

May 15, 2-4pm Reflections@ Angels Gate Cultural Center

June 18, 6-9pm Yarn Bombing 18th @ 18th Street Arts Center

April 3, 2011
Argentine judge: Turkey caused ‘Armenian genocide’

An Argentine judge says “the Turkish state committed the crime of genocide against the Armenian people” between 1915 and 1923.

The Associated Press

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina —

An Argentine judge says “the Turkish state committed the crime of genocide against the Armenian people” between 1915 and 1923.

The ruling Friday also says Turkey should help an Armenian descendant living in Argentina learn the fate of more than 50 of his relatives who disappeared nearly a century ago.

Many international experts say the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I was genocide. Turkey maintains that far fewer died and due to civil war and unrest, rather than genocide.

The Turkish Embassy in Buenos Aires has not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Judge Norberto Oyarbide says his ruling is “declarative” only, with no value other than the truth.

via Nation & World | Argentine judge: Turkey caused ‘Armenian genocide’ | Seattle Times Newspaper.

April 2, 2011