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

Hyperspectral Image Processing Using Locally Linear Embedding

We describe a method of processing hyperspectral images of natural scenes that uses a combination of k-means clustering and locally linear embedding (LLE). The primary goal is to assist anomaly detection by preserving spectral uniqueness among the pixels. In order to reduce redundancy among the pixels, adjacent pixels which are spectrally similar are grouped using the k-means clustering algorithm. Representative pixels from each cluster are chosen and passed to the LLE algorithm, where the high dimensional spectral vectors are encoded by a low dimensional mapping. Finally, monochromatic and tri-chromatic images are constructed from the k-means cluster assignments and LLE vector mappings. The method generates images where differences in the original spectra are reflected in differences in the output vector assignments. An additional benefit of mapping to a lower dimensional space is reduced data size. When spectral irregularities are added to a patch of the hyperspectral images, again the method successfully generated color assignments that detected the changes in the spectra

Estimation of stratospheric input to the Arctic troposphere: 7Be and 10Be in aerosols at Alert, Canada

Concentrations of 7Be and 210Pb in 2 years of weekly high-volume aerosol samples collected at Alert, Northwest Territories, Canada, showed pronounced seasonal variations. We observed a broad winter peak in 210Pb concentration and a spring peak in 7Be. These peaks were similar in magnitude and duration to previously reported results for a number of stations in the Arctic Basin. Beryllium 10 concentrations (determined only during the first year of this study) were well correlated with those of 7Be; the atom ratio 10Be/7Be was nearly constant at 2.2 throughout the year. This relatively high value of 10Be/7Be indicates that the stratosphere must constitute an important source of both Be isotopes in the Arctic troposphere throughout the year. A simple mixing model based on the small seasonal variations of 10Be/7Be indicates an approximately twofold increase of stratospheric influence in the free troposphere in late summer. The spring maxima in concentrations of both Be isotopes at the surface apparently reflect vertical mixing in rather than stratospheric injections into the troposphere. We have merged the results of the Be-based mixing model with weekly O3 soundings to assess Arctic stratospheric impact on the surface O3 budget at Alert. The resulting estimates indicate that stratospheric inputs can account for a maximum of 10-15% of the 03 at the surface in spring and for less during the rest of the year. These estimates are most uncertain during the winter. The combination of Be isotopic measurements and O3 vertical profiles could allow quantification of the contributions of O3 from the Arctic stratosphere and lower latitude regions to the O3 budget in the Arctic troposphere. Although at present the lack of a quantitative understanding of the temporal variation of O3 lifetime in the Arctic troposphere precludes making definitive calculations, qualitative examples of the power of this approach are given

Consumer Protection in an Era of Globalization

With expanding global trade, the challenge of protecting consumers from unsafe food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products has grown increasingly salient, necessitating the development of new policy ideas and analysis. This chapter introduces the book, Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, a multidisciplinary project analyzing import safety problems and an array of innovative solutions to these problems. The challenge of protecting the public from unsafe imports arises from the sheer volume of global trade as well as the complexity of products being traded and the vast number of inputs each product contains. It is further compounded by the fact that as products move across jurisdictional boundaries regulators face a host of legal, cultural, and practical obstacles. We argue that import safety problems require rethinking domestic regulation, whether through improving the targeting of traditional government inspections, building stronger public-private partnerships, or making changes in products liability standards. International cooperation will also be needed but will be even more challenging. At every step in the supply chain, regulators face questions of what level of safety to aim for, what form of regulatory standards to adopt, and how compliance with such standards should be monitored and enforced – and yet different countries tend to answer these questions differently. This chapter not only raises the key questions regulators and the public confront in tackling a vexing global challenge, but it also previews Import Safety’s analysis of institutional capacity and a range of potential regulatory responses that can harness market actors to drive improvements in product safety

Pupillometric Assessment of Small Doses of Opioid in a Pediatric Population

According to the CDC, opioid prescriptions in the United States have more than tripled from 1999-2014, which has correlated with the staggering increase in opioid-involved drug overdose deaths. This pattern of prescription is thought to be a major contributory factor to the increase in drug overdose in America, as four out of five new heroin users started by misusing prescription painkillers. Providers need the means to objectively monitor analgesic efficacy of treatment in patients with pain to mitigate unnecessary analgesic prescribing. It is well established that mu opioid agonists like morphine cause miosis, an effect to which tolerance does not occur. This suggests a utility in using pupil size and responsiveness as a pharmacokinetic analogue of bioavailability. An infrared pupillometer is a device that produces a short light stimulus and subsequently measures parameters of the pupillary light reflex (PLR) including maximum and minimum pupil size (MAX, MIN), maximum constriction velocity (MCV), latency period before constriction onset (LAT), change in pupil size (DELTA), and average constriction velocity (ACV). Current data supports the efficacy of using infrared pupillometry to detect high dose opioid presence, but no research exists judging its efficacy in monitoring low dose therapeutic levels. We enrolled 15 patients between the ages of 7 and 18 on the pain medicine service receiving low dose opioids on patient controlled analgesia (PCA). The pupillometer was used to take a baseline PLR, and repeated measures were taken 10 and 15-minutes post PCA dose infusion. We found that the pupil size at 10 and 15-minute time points were significantly smaller than the baseline for the parameters MAX (p=.0016, p=.0010) and MIN (p=.0250, p=.0070). Additionally, it was found that LAT was significantly longer from baseline at the 15-minute measure (p=.0350), and there was a significant difference between the 10 and 15-minute time points for the MIN (p=0.0251). This evidence supports the sensitivity of the pupillometer in evaluating opioid activity. Furthermore, in concordance with previous research, the MIN is significantly correlated with opioid concentration dose-dependently across the 15-minute measurement window. Before applying the pupillometer to clinical pain medicine, more research comparing pupillometric parameters with blood levels of opioid metabolites will serve to determine detection limits. Providers could use this tool to monitor treatment efficacy by using these parameters to assess steady state equilibrium and to determine dosing intervals. Furthermore, the pupillometric parameters could elucidate individuals’ metabolic capacity for different opioids in order to prescribe therapeutic levels