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पोकीमॉन गो, पोकेमॉन गो या Pokemon Go प्लीज गो …. पहले कान में ईयरफोन लगा कर संंगीत लगा कर, सडक पर  चलने पर तीव्र आलोचना हुआ करती थी कि ये सडक  दुर्धटना का निमंंत्रण देता है तो अब पोकीमॉन गो को क्या कहेंगें समझ से बाहर है… मुम्बई में मैनें अपनी सहेली को फोन किया […]

The post पोकीमॉन गो, पोकेमॉन गो या Pokemon Go appeared first on Monica Gupta.

In December 2013, Turkish authorities arrested the sons of several prominent cabinet ministers on bribery, embezzlement, and smuggling charges. Investigators claimed that the men were contributing members in a conspiracy to illicitly trade Turkish gold for Iranian oil gas (an act which, among other things, violates the spirit of United Nations’ sanctions targeting Tehran). The scheme purportedly netted a vast fortune in proceeds in the form of dividends and bribes. Among those suspected of benefiting from the trade was Prime Minister (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan and members of his family. The firestorm from this scandal was initially so furious many feared that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party would not survive its implications. Yet as of this September, the investigation into this scandal has all but come to an end. The officials involved in propagating and executing the investigation have all been dismissed or transferred. Consequently, virtually all charges related to the case have been dropped.

Most of the analysis of this scandal has focused upon the political implications of the arrests and the subsequent purges of Turkey’s national police force. Events since December have indeed underscored the intense levels of strife within Turkey’s governing institutions as well as the growing authoritarian tendencies of the country’s ruling party. Yet Turkey’s “oil for gold” corruption scandal also illuminates fundamental, yet long-standing, aspects of the relationship between prominent illicit trades and the country’s politics.

Turkey’s black market, by all accounts, is exceeding large and highly lucrative. As a country sitting at a major intersection in global commerce, Turkey acts as a spring, valve and spigot for multiple illicit industries. Weapons, narcotics and undocumented migrants, as well as contraband carpets, petroleum, cigarettes, and precious metals all pass in and through the country’s borders on a regular basis. Official statistics on cigarette smuggling offer a few hints of the extent of smuggling in and out of Turkey. According to Interior Ministry sources, Turkish seizures of smuggled cigarettes grew fourteen fold between 2009 and 2012 (with ten million cigarettes seized in 2009 and over 145 million in 2012). In January of this year, Bulgarian customs officials purportedly confiscated fourteen million cigarettes illegally imported from Turkey in one seizure alone. The numbers of arrests for cigarette smuggling has also climbed precipitously, with over 4000 people arrested in 2009 and over 24000 arrests in 2012.

Organized crime takes other forms in Turkey. Criminal networks, builders, and lawmakers have been known to violate laws governing land sales, usage, building safety, and contracting. Bribes and kickbacks to government officials and regulators historically have been essential elements in the rapid building projects undertaken throughout the country for much of the last century. Charges levied against the managers of Istanbul’s Fenerbahce soccer club stand as an example of the match fixing and extortion scandals that have rocked professional sports in Turkey in recent years. Gangsters and extortionists, known as kabadayı, have been counted among Turkey’s most noted and notorious figures in the public spotlight. All in all, organized criminal trades have generated an untold number of fortunes for a select few and have provided a subsistence living for an even larger number of average citizens for a very long time in Turkey.

If Tayyip Erdoğan and his family did glean a great fortune as a result of illicit doings (which some reports claim to amount to total in the tens of millions of dollars), Turkey’s president joins a fairly sizable host of Turkish politicians who have benefited from organized criminal trades. American officials in the 1950s, for example, secretly suspected that noted members of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party had protected major Turkish heroin traffickers. During the 1970s, at least four members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly were official charged with attempting to transport heroin abroad. Other politicians from this era, including one-time Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, were unofficially suspected of engaging in the drug trade but never charged. Accusations of theft and corruption especially dogged the governments of the tumultuous 1990s. Tansu Ciller, the country’s first female prime minister, was implicated in organized criminal activity both before and after she was first elected to office. Tayyip Erdoğan’s JDP came to power in 2002 with the promise of bringing discipline and respectability to politics. Yet even as recent as last year, a regional JDP chairman was implicated in trading in heroin in the province of Van. The revelations of December 2013 now has many in Turkey convinced that the JDP is as dirty and corruptible as any of the parties that had preceded it.

Erdoğan’s ability to deflect last year’s corruption charges has not put the specter of smuggling and corruption to rest. Local media reports and other studies suggest that the Syrian civil war has stimulated a surge in smuggling along Turkey’s southern border. It is now estimated that fuel, cigarette, and cell phone smuggling has risen by 314%, 135%, and 563% respectively since the war began. The initial efforts to arm and maintain resistance groups in Syria were deeply indebted to Turkey’s smuggling trade. As smuggling continues, it is clear that some groups have attempted to tax trade into and out of Syria (al-Nusrah, for example, purportedly levies a fee of 500 Syrian lira for every barrel of fuel that crosses the border). What this means for the present and future of Turkey’s government is not entirely clear. Suggestions that Ankara has allowed for the passage of large numbers of foreign fighters into Syria has cast doubt over the country’s police and customs officials stationed on its borders (particularly after the official purges earlier this year). Trading schemes and corruption allegations like those revealed in December may yet again manifest themselves considering what international watchdogs call Turkey’s “grey” status as a state with loose embezzlement and money laundering controls. Whether these trends will dent the image of Tayyip Erdoğan or upend JDP control over Turkey remains to be seen.

Headline Image: Turkish flag photo by Abigail Powell. CC BY-NC 2.0 by Flickr

The post Corruption, crime, and scandal in Turkey appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Bill Wiist As in many other aspects of the global economy, corporations continue to exert inordinate influence over aspects of trade agreements that control life and death, and the rule of democracy particularly in low and middle-income countries. Corporations are able to disproportionately influence provisions of trade agreements to a far greater extent than public health, labor, other citizen representatives, and low-income countries. Corporations are allowed greater access to the trade agreement development process. For example, in the U.S. the memberships of the advisory committees to the

A series of posts about my favorite book-related things would be incomplete without a mention of one of my favorite things to do with books online: trading. The idea is simple. You post books you are done with or no longer want online. Those books can be requested by other members of the site, and when you send books out you have the opportunity to request new books that you do want in return.

I’ve participated in many book trading websites over the past 5 years, and I have to say that when all is said and done, Paperbackswap.com is probably my favorite. There are pros and cons to just about every trading site out there, and Paperbackswap (PBS) is certainly not perfect, but I have to say I think it has the best combination of good and bad. So here is a list of my favorite things about this website.

Free credits – Every member who signs up and posts 10 books on their account gets 2 startup credits. So you can request 2 books right away without having to wait to send anything out. And, if you decide the site isn’t for you later on after sending a few books, you can always close your account and walk away.

Wish List – Out of all the wish list features on sites I’ve done, this one is probably the fairest. Everything is done First In, First Out. So the first person to put a book on their list is the first one given the opportunity to get that book when it’s posted. Granted, sometimes it’s hard to be patient, especially when it’s a book I’m excited about. But people can post books directly to a personal wish list too, so sometimes someone takes pity on me and offers a book on my list.

The Forums – Specifically the Wish List Multiples thread. All the forums are great, but this particular thread is awesome, both for book senders, and book wishers. If you have a lot of wish list books and want to save on postage by sending them all to one person, you can post them there and have people request multiple books from you. On the flip side, this is one of the ways you have get a book posted directly to your wish list, which is always a fun thing.

Credits – I’ve done trade sites that are based on points as well as direct trade systems. I like PBS’s system. 1 credit per book, 2 credits for audiobooks. Yeah, sometimes it sucks to pay the postage to send out a heavy hardcover book and spend that credit on a light paperback in return. But I figure I order plenty of hardbacks from other members too, so it all evens out in the end.

Swapping Criteria – PBS is one of the few sites I know of that has “swapping criteria”. This means that books must meet basic rules to be swapped there. Rather than mess with condition notes, it is expected for all books posted to swap will meet the criteria. So I can order books knowing that they shouldn’t have water damage, writing/highlighting, etc. and avoid the whole “buyer beware” problem.

Tour Guides – Maybe I’m a little biased with this feature, since I am a Tour Guide. But I think the Live Help feature is great. Emailing a site admin can sometimes take days for a response, and if it’s just a little question sometimes it isn’t worth the hassle. But you can use the Live Help feature to ask a Tour Guide, and oftentimes they can solve the problem/question for you within an hour. A Tour Guide is assigned to all new members, so if you have questions about how things work at the beginning they can help a lot with that. I had a great tour guide when I signed up, and it made me want to become one myself a few years later. And I love helping other members.

Okay, so this post has gotten long, so I’ll stop gushing and wrap up. Bottom line is, if you haven’t tried trading, give it a try. Whether it’s through a site like PBS, Goodreads bookswap, or just interacting with your online

I'm looking for the below books as a Christmas present for a friend. Does anyone have these and want to trade? I have a bunch of 2011 ARCs including Unearthly, Once In A Full Moon, A Touch Mortal, and others, as well as a whole bunch of other paperbacks and hardcovers I can trade as well.

So if you have any of these, send me a email at shadyglade(AT)mail(DOT)com and I can send you a full list of what I have available to trade. ARCs might be okay too, so even if you only have an ARC copy, let me know.

Thanks for the help!

13 to Life by Shannon Delany
Angel Star by Jennifer Murgia
Another Faust by Daniel and Dina Nayeri
Blood Feud by Alyxandra Harvey
Dark Flame by Alyson Noël
Deadly Little Lies by Laurie Faria Stolarz
Fairy Tale by Cyn Balog
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel
Nevermore by Kelly Creagh
Night Star Alyson Noël
Personal Demons by Lisa Desrochers
So Many Boys by Suzanne Young
The Dark Divine by Bree Despain
The Plague by Joanne Dahme

Bloomsbury has acquired the Ducksworth Academics list. Peter Mayer, the managing director of Duckworth, and Nigel Newton, the CEO of Bloomsbury, made the joint announcement earlier this week.

Bloomsbury’s Bristol Classical Press will oversee the academic list and that is the name it will operate under. In addition, the Duckworth Trade list will be sold by Bloomsbury in the UK and overseas. Ducksworth will remain an independent press after the transition.

Mayer explained: “We have sought to develop a structure for our two parts and we found it with Bloomsbury. The new structure looks to a future in which both parts of the present Duckworth can prosper in different ways. On the general side we aim to fulfill the promise of the historic Duckworth Trade list, a trade publisher since its founding by Gerald Duckworth in 1898.” (Via Publishers Weekly)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Kent Jones is Professor of Economics at Babson College and the author of The Doha Blues: Institutional Crisis and Reform in the WTO.  The book highlights the real stumbling blocks to trade liberalization and highlights the way around them, in light of the collapse of the Doha Round.  Jones outlines the practical steps that must be taken before the World Trade Organization can achieve accord.  In the excerpt below, Jones begins to outline the problems the Doha negotiations have faced.

Why have the Doha negotiations been so painfully slow and unsuccessful so far?  A review of recent commentary and analysis seems to indicate that the difficulty has many roots, as shown by the following list of contributing factors:

1. -Multilateral trade negotiations have become too unwieldy to manage effectively. Membership in the GATT grew dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the WTO as of 2009 had 153 members, a large number to manage in a consensus-based decision process. In addition, the number of issues has grown with the expanded scope of the WTo coverage into agriculture, services, and “behind-the-border” trade issues.
2. -The single undertaking was a good idea in principle, but it doesn’t work in practice.  In order to provide the widest possible scope of trade-offs that would provide each member with a stake in the negotiating outcome, and to avoid the fragmentation of the GATT system of codes, the WTO was founded on the principle that “there is no agreement until everything is agreed.”  In conjunction with the unwieldy scope of membership and agenda issues indicated in the first item above, some argue that forcing the negotiating outcome into a single, balanced package for all members is virtually unachievable.
3. -The balance of power in trade negotiations has shifted in favor of large developing countries.  The United States and the European Union had dominated trade negotiations for many years, and while they remain the world’s leading traders (both in imports and exports), their relative importance in trade has diminished, and many faster-growing developing countries, such as India, Brazil, and China, are now asserting greater influence over the WTO negotiating process.
4. -The Doha Development Round was oversold as a trade negotiation to promote development. Leading developed countries agreed to present the Doha negotiations as a “development” round in order to provide developing countries with a strong incentive to participate.  Yet the WTO is not a development agency, even if it plays an important part in development.  It was impossible for the Doha Round to fulfill the expectations of a trade round presumably focused on development goals.
5. -Developing countries are “mad as hell” and won’t take it anymore.  In conjunction with the previous item, many developing countries were disappointed in the outcome of the Uruguay Round, in which they expected large gains from liberalization of textile and clothing trade in exchange for commitments on the protection of developed countries’ intellectual property and on other “behind the border issues.”  The delayed textile/clothing trade liberalization, in which China won the lion’s share of gains, combined with the potentially large costs of intellectual property protection and the financial cost of
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So last month I started my new wishlist feature. And thank you to everyone who'e emailed me to set up trades, I've got some great stuff from everyone!

But I'm about to donate a huge amount of my books to a school library. So I'm posting a slideshow of the books I have available in case anyone wants to trade before I do that. So if you see something you like, email me right away and let me know so I can save the book for you. Otherwise, most of these are going to get shipped off on July 8th. And if you want to trade, you can see my wishlist in the sidebar over there <---- near the middle. (If you're reading this in a feed, you might need to click over to the acutal post to see the slideshow)

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon reflects on an article he saw in The New York Times Book Review.

Last Sunday, in the New York Times, I read a book reviewer taking an author to task for her word use. The reviewer stated that “the last time I checked the American Heritage Dictionary, in spite of how computer trade journalists might choose to use the word, “architect” was not recognized as a verb”.

First, putting aside the obvious slander against computer trade journalists (who themselves would likely not claim to be arbiters of what is recognized in language), are there perhaps some other sources that might recognize “architect” as a verb? Surprisingly enough, there are - both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Third International list “architect” as a verb.

The OED provides citations from as far back as 1813, quoting a letter from Keats, in which he writes “This was architected thus By the great Oceanus.” The OED also specifies that the word, in addition to being used as a verb, is used in a figurative and transferred sense. Perhaps those computer trade journalists were engaging their poetic whimsy and quoting this early nineteenth century versifier.

Webster’s Third does not provide dates for their citation (“the book is not well architected”), but it is from the Times Literary Supplement, and so perhaps the aforementioned computer trade journalists were simply imitating the writing style of some other, more lofty and intellectual publication.

It is always a little bit risky to make a claim that something is not a word, or not used thusly, or has never been a certain part of speech. First, there is simply the possibility that you are wrong. But also, if you spend enough time looking through dictionaries you are just as likely as not to find one or two which contradict whatever position you’ve so boldly staked out. Of course, the flip side of this is that if someone states that you are wrong on the meaning of a word, you can usually find some source that will back up your position.

I’ll bet that the hordes of angry computer trade journalists who read that comment are right now sharpening their pens and rifling through their dictionaries, searching about for the perfect vicious rejoinder to refute this review.

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