Turkey blocks Twitter after PM's threat to 'wipe out' service

ANKARA, Turkey: Twitter went dark in Turkey late Thursday, just hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “wipe out” the social network which, along with others, was highlighting corruption allegations against his inner circle.

Moscow 'Concerned' Over Treatment Of Russians In Estonia

 

REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Armed men, believed to be Russian soldiers, stand guard outside a Ukrainian military base in Simferopol March 19, 2014. Defying Ukrainian protests and Western sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty in Moscow on Tuesday making Crimea part of Russia again, but said he did not plan to seize any other regions of Ukraine.

Russia fully supported the protection of the rights of linguistic minorities, a Moscow diplomat told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, according to a summary of the session issued by the U.N.'s information department.

Russia Just Warned The US That It May Play The 'Iran Card' On Ukraine

Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

A senior Russian diplomat signaled a possible shift Wednesday in Russia's position on the ongoing Iranian nuclear talks amid tensions with the United States and other Western countries, according to The Associated Press.

Three Years of Revolt: What Has Become of Syria's Revolutionaries

By Christoph Reuter and Raniah Salloum

Christoph Reuter

They have fled, they are hungry, they are doing what they can to survive: The Syrian civil war has caused great suffering since the protests agains President Bashar Assad began three years ago. We revisit some of those people we have met in our reporting.

Washington’s back-to-the-future military policies in Africa

 America’s new model for expeditionary warfare

Nick Turse

 

Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you. It isn’t. It’s the language of the U.S. military’s simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn’t locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.

Reserve Currency and Military Power: Lessons from the Sterling Era and the Future of America’s Military Might

Do states with reserve currency status hold the upper hand when it comes to maintaining their military might? Rosella Cappella believes so. To help illustrate her point – and what it might mean for the United States – she looks at how Britain once used its ‘Sterling supremacy’ as a ‘power multiplier’.

By Rosella Cappella

As Iran’s New Year looms, economy continues to struggle

As the Iranian year draws to a close, leaders here are attempting to manage the expectations of a public who have seen few signs of the economic improvement promised by President Hassan Rouhani when he took office in August.

Vahid Salemi/AP - Two Iranians fly a wishing lantern in the Pardisan Park in Tehran, Iran, March 18, 2014, during Chaharshanbe Souri, or Wednesday Feast, an ancient Festival of Fire, on the eve of the last Wednesday of the year, when Iranians jump over burning bonfires and throw firecrackers celebrating arrival of the spring which coincides with their new year, or Nowruz, which begins on March 21.

Despite some progress toward a lasting nuclear deal that could potentially end years of crushing sanctions, fiscal growth has been slow, and many here worry that the incoming year — 1393 on the Iranian calendar — will bring even leaner times.

Περικοπές Ρέντσι 34 δισ. €

Ξεπέρασε με επιτυχία τον «σκόπελο» της Ανγκελα Μέρκελ και αυτό έδωσε αρκετούς «πόντους» στον νεαρό πρωθυπουργό της Ιταλίας, ο οποίος περνά όπως φαίνεται στην επόμενη δύσκολη φάση του εγχειρήματός του, δηλαδή στη δραστική μείωση των δαπανών του ιταλικού Δημοσίου.

Ο Ματέο Ρέντσι αφού ξεπέρασε τον «σκόπελο» της Ανγκελα Μέρκελ περνά όπως φαίνεται στην επόμενη δύσκολη φάση του εγχειρήματός του, δηλαδή στη δραστική μείωση των δαπανών του ιταλικού Δημοσίου

Ο Ματέο Ρέντσι είχε δηλώσει ότι προκειμένου να χαλαρώσει τη σκληρή λιτότητα και να προχωρήσει σε μείωση των φόρων για τα φτωχότερα νοικοκυριά, θα πρέπει να σφίξει το... ζωνάρι στον δημόσιο τομέα.

Russia Examines Its Options for Responding to Ukraine

The fall of the Ukrainian government and its replacement with one that appears to be oriented toward the West represents a major defeat for the Russian Federation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia accepted the reality that the former Eastern European satellite states would be absorbed into the Western economic and political systems. Moscow claims to have been assured that former Soviet republics would be left as a neutral buffer zone and not absorbed. Washington and others have disputed that this was promised. In any case, it was rendered meaningless when the Baltic states were admitted to NATO and the European Union. The result was that NATO, which had been almost 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from St. Petersburg, was now less than approximately 160 kilometers away.  

This left Belarus and Ukraine as buffers. Ukraine is about 480 kilometers from Moscow at its closest point. Were Belarus and Ukraine both admitted to NATO, the city of Smolensk, which had been deep inside the Soviet Union, would have become a border town. Russia has historically protected itself with its depth. It moved its borders as far west as possible, and that depth deterred adventurers -- or, as it did with Hitler and Napoleon, destroyed them. The loss of Ukraine as a buffer to the West leaves Russia without that depth and hostage to the intentions and capabilities of Europe and the United States. 

ΟΟΣΑ: Χρόνια ανεργία, σε διαρκή οικονομική στασιμότητα

Τις κοινωνικές επιπτώσεις της οικονομικής κρίσης επισημαίνει ο ΟΟΣΑ σε έκθεσή του. Οι άνεργοι φθάνουν τα 48 εκατομμύρια στις 34 χώρες του ΟΟΣΑ. Ο αριθμός τους αυξήθηκε κατά 15 εκατομμύρια από την έναρξη της κρίσης το 2007.

Οι κοινωνικές συνέπειες ίσως είναι αισθητές για πολλά χρόνια, καθώς οι προοπτικές απασχόλησης για τους νέους και τους ανειδίκευτους εργαζομένους επιδεινώθηκαν σημαντικά στις χώρες του Οργανισμού Οικονομικής Συνεργασίας και Ανάπτυξης λόγω της οικονομικής κρίσης, γράφει η έκθεση που δόθηκε την Τρίτη στη δημοσιότητα.