Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media, and Power in Turkey

In November 2013, a Freedom House delegation traveled to Turkey to meet with journalists, NGOs, business leaders, and senior government officials about the deteriorating state of media freedom in the country. The delegation's objective, and the plan for this report, was to investigate reports of government efforts to pressure and intimidate journalists and of overly close relationships between media owners and government, which, along with bad laws and overly aggressive prosecutors, have muzzled objective reporting in Turkey.Since November, events in Turkey have taken a severe turn for the worse. The police raids that revealed a corruption scandal on December 17, and the allegations of massive bidrigging and money laundering by people at the highest levels of the government, have sparked a frantic crackdown by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party. More journalists have been fired for speaking out. Hundreds of police officers and prosecutors have been fired or relocated across the country. Amendments to the new Internet regulation law proposed by the government would make it possible for officials to block websites without court orders. The government is also threatening the separation of powers by putting the judiciary, including criminal investigations, under direct control of the Ministry of Justice. The crisis of democracy in Turkey is not a future problem -- it is right here, right now.This report on the media recognizes that what is happening in Turkey is bigger than one institution and part of a long history that continues to shape current events. The media in Turkey have always been close to the state; as recently as 1997, large media organizations were co-opted by the military to subvert a democratically elected government. The AK Party was formed in the wake of those events. But even as it has tamed the military, the AKP has been unable to resist the temptations of authoritarianism embedded in the state the military helped create. Over the past seven years, the government has increasingly employed a variety of strong-arm tactics to suppress the media's proper role as a check on power. Some of the most disturbing efforts include the following:Intimidation: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an frequently attacks journalists by name after they write critical commentary. In several well-known cases, like those of Hasan Cemal and Nuray Mert, journalists have lost their jobs after these public attacks. Sympathetic courts hand out convictions in defamation cases for criticism.Mass firings: At least 59 journalists were fired or forced out in retaliation for their coverage of last summer's Gezi Park protests. The December corruption scandal has produced another string of firings of prominent columnists.Buying off or forcing out media moguls: Holding companies sympathetic to the government receive billions of dollars in government contracts, often through government bodies housed in the prime minister's office. Companies with media outlets critical of the government have been targets of tax investigations, forced to pay large fines, and likely disadvantaged in public tenders.Wiretapping: The National Security Organization has wiretapped journalists covering national security stories, using false names on the warrants in order to avoid judicial scrutiny.Imprisonment: Dozens of journalists remain imprisoned under broadly defined antiterrorism laws. A majority of those in prison are Kurds, and some analysts believe the government is using them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Kurdish PKKThese tactics are unacceptable in a democracy. They deny Turkish citizens full access to information and constrain a healthy political debate. Journalists and government officials alike acknowledge that reporters and news organizations have practiced self-censorship to avoid angering the government, and especially Prime Minister Erdogan.The intentional weakening of Turkey's democratic institutions, including attempts to bully and censor Turkey's media, should and must be a matter of deep concern for the United States and the European Union. As the AKParty's internal coalition has grown more fragile, Erdogan has used his leverage over the media to push issues of public morality and religion and to squelch public debate of the accountability of his government. The result is an increasingly polarized political arena and society.Freedom House calls on the government of Turkey to recognize that in a democracy, a free press and other independent institutions play a very important role. There are clear and concrete steps the Turkish government must take to end the intimidation and corruption of Turkey's media. Chief among these are the following:Cease threats against journalists.Repeal the criminal defamation law and overly broad antiterrorism and "criminal organization" laws that have been used to jail dozens of journalists.Comply with European and international standards in procurement practices in order to reduce the incentive for media owners to curry favor by distorting the news. Turkish media owners themselves must make a commitment to support changes in procurement practices if they are to win back the trust of Turkey's citizens.Although building a resilient democracy is fundamentally up to Turkish citizens, the international community cannot afford to be bystanders. The European Union and the OSCE have raised strong concerns about government pressure on Turkey's media, and the EU's warnings against governmental overreach have been pointed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the United States. The Obama administration has been far too slow to realize the seriousness of the threat to Turkey's democracy. U.S. criticism of the Turkish government's recent actions has come from the State Department spokesperson and White House press secretary, not from the high-ranking officials who need to be engaged in responding to a crisis of this scale. Where European governments and institutions have been specifically and publicly engaged with the government over the crisis, the Obama administration has avoided the difficult issues. It is time to speak frankly and with seriousness about the growing threat to democracy in Turkey, and to place freedom of expression and democracy at the center of the policy relationship

Solution generating with perfect fluids

We apply a technique, due to Stephani, for generating solutions of the Einstein-perfect fluid equations. This technique is similar to the vacuum solution generating techniques of Ehlers, Harrison, Geroch and others. We start with a ``seed'' solution of the Einstein-perfect fluid equations with a Killing vector. The seed solution must either have (i) a spacelike Killing vector and equation of state P=rho or (ii) a timelike Killing vector and equation of state rho+3P=0. The new solution generated by this technique then has the same Killing vector and the same equation of state. We choose several simple seed solutions with these equations of state and where the Killing vector has no twist. The new solutions are twisting versions of the seed solutions

Profile instabilities of the millisecond pulsar PSR J1022+1001

We present evidence that the integrated profiles of some millisecond pulsars exhibit severe changes that are inconsistent with the moding phenomenon as known from slowly rotating pulsars. We study these profile instabilities in particular for PSR J1022+1001 and show that they occur smoothly, exhibiting longer time constants than those associated with moding. In addition, the profile changes of this pulsar seem to be associated with a relatively narrow-band variation of the pulse shape. Only parts of the integrated profile participate in this process which suggests that the origin of this phenomenon is intrinsic to the pulsar magnetosphere and unrelated to the interstellar medium. A polarization study rules out profile changes due to geometrical effects produced by any sort of precession. However, changes are observed in the circularly polarized radiation component. In total we identify four recycled pulsars which also exhibit instabilities in the total power or polarization profiles due to an unknown phenomenon (PSRs J1022+1001, J1730-2304, B1821-24, J2145-0750). The consequences for high precision pulsar timing are discussed in view of the standard assumption that the integrated profiles of millisecond pulsars are stable. As a result we present a new method to determine pulse times-of-arrival that involves an adjustment of relative component amplitudes of the template profile. Applying this method to PSR J1022+1001, we obtain an improved timing solution with a proper motion measurement of -17 \pm 2 mas/yr in ecliptic longitude. Assuming a distance to the pulsar as inferred from the dispersion measure this corresponds to an one-dimensional space velocity of 50 km/s.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Can the design of glove dispensing boxes influence glove contamination?

Background Few studies have explored the microbial contamination of glove boxes in clinical settings. The objective of this observational study was to investigate whether a new glove packaging system in which gloves are dispensed one by one vertically with the cuff-end first has lower levels of contamination on the gloves and on the surface around the box aperture compared to conventional horizontally dispensed glove boxes. Methods Seven participating sites were provided with vertical glove dispensing systems and conventional boxes. Before opening boxes, the surface around the aperture was sampled microbiologically to establish base-line levels of superficial contamination. Once the boxes were opened, the first pair of gloves in each box were sampled for viable bacteria. Thereafter, testing sites were visited on a weekly basis over a period of six weeks and the same microbiological assessments made. Results The surface surrounding the aperture of the modified dispenser boxes became significantly less contaminated than the conventional boxes (P < 0.001) with an average of 46.7% less contamination around the aperture. Overall, gloves from modified boxes showed significantly less colony-forming units contamination than gloves from conventional boxes (P < 0.001). Comparing all sites over the entire six-week period, modified dispensed gloves had 88.9% less bacterial contamination. Conclusion This simple improvement to glove box design reduces contamination of unused gloves. Such modifications could decrease the risk of microbial cross-transmission in settings that utilise gloves. However, such advantages do not substitute for strict hand-hygiene compliance and appropriate use of non-sterile, single-use gloves

Intrinsic Geometry of a Null Hypersurface

We apply Cartan's method of equivalence to construct invariants of a given null hypersurface in a Lorentzian space-time. This enables us to fully classify the internal geometry of such surfaces and hence solve the local equivalence problem for null hypersurface structures in 4-dimensional Lorentzian space-times

COLD GASS, an IRAM Legacy Survey of Molecular Gas in Massive Galaxies: III. Comparison with semi-analytic models of galaxy formation

We compare the semi-analytic models of galaxy formation of Fu et al. (2010), which track the evolution of the radial profiles of atomic and molecular gas in galaxies, with gas fraction scaling relations derived from the COLD GASS survey (Saintonge et al 2011). The models provide a good description of how condensed baryons in galaxies with gas are partitioned into stars, atomic and molecular gas as a function of galaxy stellar mass and surface density. The models do not reproduce the tight observed relation between stellar surface density and bulge-to-disk ratio for this population. We then turn to an analysis of the"quenched" population of galaxies without detectable cold gas. The current implementation of radio-mode feedback in the models disagrees strongly with the data. In the models, gas cooling shuts down in nearly all galaxies in dark matter halos above a mass of 10**12 M_sun. As a result, stellar mass is the observable that best predicts whether a galaxy has little or no neutral gas. In contrast, our data show that quenching is largely independent of stellar mass. Instead, there are clear thresholds in bulge-to-disk ratio and in stellar surface density that demarcate the location of quenched galaxies. We propose that processes associated with bulge formation play a key role in depleting the neutral gas in galaxies and that further gas accretion is suppressed following the formation of the bulge, even in dark matter halos of low mass.Comment: 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, the COLD GASS data is available at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/COLD_GASS/data.shtm

ESTIMATING THE SUBJECT BY TREATMENT INTERACTION IN NON-REPLICATED CROSSOVER DIET STUDIES

Researchers in human nutrition commonly refer to the ‘consistent’ diet effect (i.e. the main effect of diet) and an ‘inconsistent’ diet effect (i.e. a subject by diet interaction). However, due to the non-replicated designs of most studies, one can only estimate the first part using ANOVA; the latter (interaction) is confounded with the residual noise. In many diet studies, it appears that subjects do respond differently to the same diet, so the subject by diet interaction may be large. In a search of over 40,000 published human nutrition studies, most using a crossover design, we found that in none was a subject by diet interaction effect estimated. For this paper, we examined LDL-cholesterol data from a non-replicated crossover study with four diets, the typical American diet, with and without added plant sterols, and a cholesterol-lowering Step-1 diet, with and without sterols. We also examined LDL-cholesterol data from a second crossover study with some replications with three diets, representing the daily supplement of 0, 1 or 2 servings of pistachio nuts. These two data sets were chosen because experience suggested that LDLcholesterol responses to diet tend to be subject-specific. The second data set, with some replication, allowed us to estimate the subject by diet interaction term in a traditional ANOVA framework. One approach to estimating an interaction effect in non-replicated studies is through the use of a multiplicative decomposition of the interaction (sometimes called AMMI―additive main effects, multiplicative interaction). In this type of analysis, residuals, formed after estimated main effects are subtracted from the data, are arrayed in a matrix with diets as columns and subjects as rows. A singular value decomposition of the matrix is performed and the first, or first and second, principal component(s) are used as estimates of the interaction, and can be tested for significance using approximate F-tests. Using the R gnm package, we found large and significant subject by diet interaction effects in both data sets; estimates of the interaction in the second data set were similar to interaction estimates from traditional ANOVA. Of an additional 26 dependent variables from the first and a third data set (the latter investigating the effect of mild alcohol consumption on blood variables), 19 had significant subject by diet interactions, based on the AMMI methodology. These results suggest that the subject by diet interaction is often important and should not be ignored when analyzing data obtained from non-replicated crossover designs―the AMMI methodology works well and is readily available in statistical software packages

Magnetic force microscopy study of magnetization reversal in sputtered FeSiAl(N) films

The magnetization reversal in a series of rf-sputtered FeSiAl(N) films has been studied using magnetic force microscopy. A system has been developed which has the capability to image domain structure while an in-plane magnetic field is applied in situ. All films exhibited a stripe domain structure in zero applied field which was indicative of a perpendicular component of domain magnetization which alternates in sign. All films showed a similar sequence of magnetization processes: on reducing the applied field from saturation a fine stripe domain structure nucleated and then coarsened as the field was decreased to zero. Local switching of domain contrast was observed along the steepest part of the hysteresis loop as the perpendicular component reversed. As the reverse field was increased toward saturation, the stripe domains disintegrated into smaller regions. This observation is consistent with an interpretation that the domain magnetization rotated locally into the sample plane. The saturation field and the film stress exhibited similar trends with nitrogen partial pressure. The results suggest that the perpendicular anisotropy that caused the formation of the stripe domain structure could be induced by the film stress via magnetoelastic coupling

Constraining the dense matter equation-of-state with radio pulsars

Radio pulsars provide some of the most important constraints for our understanding of matter at supranuclear densities. So far, these constraints are mostly given by precision mass measurements of neutron stars (NS). By combining single measurements of the two most massive pulsars, J0348$+$0432 and J0740$+$6620, the resulting lower limit of 1.98 $M_\odot$ (99% confidence) of the maximum NS mass, excludes a large number of equations of state (EOSs). Further EOS constraints, complementary to other methods, are likely to come from the measurement of the moment of inertia (MOI) of binary pulsars in relativistic orbits. The Double Pulsar, PSR J0737$-$3039A/B, is the most promising system for the first measurement of the MOI via pulsar timing. Reviewing this method, based in particular on the first MeerKAT observations of the Double Pulsar, we provide well-founded projections into the future by simulating timing observations with MeerKAT and the SKA. For the first time, we account for the spin-down mass loss in the analysis. Our results suggest that an MOI measurement with 11% accuracy (68% confidence) is possible by 2030. If by 2030 the EOS is sufficiently well known, however, we find that the Double Pulsar will allow for a 7% test of Lense-Thirring precession, or alternatively provide a $\sim3\sigma$-measurement of the next-to-leading order gravitational wave damping in GR. Finally, we demonstrate that potential new discoveries of double NS systems with orbital periods shorter than that of the Double Pulsar promise significant improvements in these measurements and the constraints on NS matter.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures. Accepted by MNRA

Sounding the Alarm Round 2: Protecting Democracy in Ukraine

In 2010 Freedom House released its first special report on Ukraine, "Sounding the Alarm: Protecting Democracy in Ukraine". That report, as the title suggested, warned that Ukraine was heading in the wrong direction on a number of fronts: consolidation of power in the executive branch at the expense of democratic development, a more restrictive environment for the media, selective prosecution of opposition figures, worrisome instances of intrusiveness by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), widely criticized local elections in October 2010, a pliant Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament), an erosion of basic freedoms of assembly and speech, and widening corruption. "Ukraine under President Yanukovych," last year's report warned, "has become less democratic and, if current trends are left unchecked, may head down a path toward autocracy and kleptocracy."A year later, most of those key concerns remain, and in some cases the problems have grown considerably worse, especially in the area of selective prosecution of opposition figures and corruption. The mayoral election in Obukhiv in March was widely criticized for its alleged rigging and fraud and bodes badly for the upcoming Verkhovna Rada elections. The term "familyization" was commonly used by interlocutors, implying that President Yanukovych's family has not only benefitted personally from his presidency (see the section below on corruption) but is increasingly at the center of power and governance. Freedom House's ranking of Ukraine in its Freedom in the World 2012 report remained in the Partly Free category with a negative trend; the same assessment can be found in Freedom House's just-released "Nations in Transit." Against this backdrop, Freedom House, with support from the Open Society Foundations' Ukrainian arm, the International Renaissance Foundation, undertook this follow-up special report on Ukraine