Showdown

Le Monde seems to be the only site having a current article on the latest news in Turkey: the Constitutional Court has ruled in favor of universal suffrage for presidential elections. However, this old BBC article (from when the reform passed the Turkish parliament) covers most of the same ground in English.

Basically, this is the story: the Islamic party AKP (Party of Justice and Development) and 'their' prime minister Erdogan failed to get their candidate elected as president, so they decided they wanted universal suffrage for future presidential elections, instead of seven people in Parliament making the call. But no, said the secular Turkish president, speaking for the supposedly secular Turkish nation, and vetoed it. When it passed Parliament again, President Sezer had a problem, since reforms can only be vetoed once. He had to request that the Constitutional Court get rid of it. Just today, six of the eleven judges on the Court denied this request (a surprise decision), which means the reform must go to a referendum. Now everyone waits to find out what happens in the referendum... well, that is, they wait to find out first of all when this referendum will take place, as the president has not yet set a date. We do at least know when it will not be. It will not be at the same time as the legislative elections scheduled for the 22 July, since he said this to the AKP back in the middle of June.

And now, on a much lighter and less politically tense note, it seems there is a particular trend in the style of sunglasses sported by the Turkish military (as seen in the above link to the Le Monde article) and the prime minister himself.

By the way, did anyone else notice that Le Monde catalogued that article under "Pacific Asia"? Is it just me, or is that halfway around the world?