BBC4 Beyond Belief: Turkey

Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed July's failed military coup on the exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers. Since a 3-month state of emergency was declared, more than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs in the military, educational institutions, the judiciary and the media. Gulen has denied involvement in the attempted coup.

Turkey is around 97% Muslim. However, there have been growing concerns among many who see the conservative religious reforms of Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party as being in opposition to the modern secular republic established in the 1920s by nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk.

What do recent events say about the place of religion in Turkey? How strong is the tension between secularism and Islamism? What does the future hold for religious freedom in Turkey?

Ernie Rea discusses religion in Turkey with Bill Park, senior lecturer at King's College London and policy advisor for the Centre for Turkey Studies; Ozcan Keles, Muslim chairperson of the Gulen-inspired UK charity, the Dialogue Society; and Hakan Camuz; Muslim international legal consultant and supporter of the Turkish government.

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Vox: Donald Trump is no longer starring in Politics: The Reality Show, and it’s hurting him

Clinton, accidentally, ended up spending a lot of time preparing for just this format this very year when she took part in a handful of debates against her one serious challenger: Bernie Sanders. She also ran for the US Senate and one-on-one against Barack Obama for months of the 2008 primary. And this showed throughout performance choices both made in the debate.

For instance, when there’s a two-person debate, the networks customarily keep both onscreen the full time. (In the Republican debates, Trump often only had to share space with a news ticker.) And where Trump’s reality show turns work really well in those wider shots — probably thanks to The Apprentice, where he’s most often held in a mid-shot that allows for his frequent gestures to land — they don’t work in the much tighter shots used in this debate. [...]

In contrast, Clinton’s dream outcome for the night was essentially to bait Trump into responding to her attacks on him, thereby making the debate all about him. (In a debate where both candidates have low favorability ratings, both are essentially trying to make the election about how much voters don’t like their opponent.) When he couldn’t resist taking her up on her invitations, he ended up playing exactly into the narrative she wanted to lay out: He can’t be trusted to stand firm.

I don’t want to overstate Clinton’s performance here. She was too canned in places, and it was all too obvious when she was reciting a line she had worked on in her debate prep. But it was also obvious that she knew, on some level, what she was doing and she had come prepared to do the job. It’s almost like a meta-commentary on both campaigns, expressed in 90 minutes of live television.

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The New Yorker: Why Ted Cruz Surrendered to Donald Trump

But Ryan, despite his charming air of moderation—one not backed up by his actual hard-line conservative policies—was the one presiding at the Convention. He endorsed Trump months ago, and lately seems to have given up even offering alibi-attempting criticisms of Trump’s policies. (Last Thursday, at his weekly press conference, Ryan told reporters that, basically, he’d rather talk about himself.) For all the talk of the Republican establishment’s rejection of Trump, very few of its leaders or its elected officials have been willing to do so publicly. Last week, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland (and R.F.K.’s daughter) excitedly told the world that George H. W. Bush had told her privately that he would vote for Hillary Clinton. Bush’s spokesperson quickly told the press that he would not confirm such a thing. Whatever the elder Bush’s reservations about his party’s nominee might be, he was keeping them private. Only half a dozen Republican senators have come out and opposed Trump, a couple of them in highly hedged terms. There was a fair amount of excitement when Susan Collins joined their ranks in early August. Since then, though, it’s been quiet. For all the complaints about how the press has “normalized” Trump, it is the Republican Party, institutionally, that has done so. Ryan has said that giving Trump a chance to appoint Supreme Court Justices was high among his reasons for voting for him. (Ryan said that soon after Trump suggested that a judge whose family roots were in Mexico could not be trusted to deliver justice, which might give a person pause before letting Trump pick any.) The Supreme Court was also the first reason Cruz listed in his endorsement.

It wasn’t really harder for Cruz than for most of them; if anything, it was easier. He agrees with Trump in most policy areas, and where he doesn’t he is to the right of Trump. Trump has acknowledged that Planned Parenthood provides useful health services; Cruz has portrayed the organization as a criminal gang. (Both, though, would ban abortion in most circumstances.) Cruz has had his own flights of religious bigotry, calling for new police powers to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.” And, although he may have objected to his father’s being linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, via a grainy picture and a lot of illogical leaps, his own rhetoric is rife with plots against America. In his Facebook post, Cruz described “eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration,” and warned that Hillary Clinton “would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism,” in part by “importing” refugees who might be terrorists. “Our country is in crisis,” Cruz wrote. “Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.” That is the same Trump he called a “pathological liar” and a “bully.” “The man is utterly amoral,” Cruz said at a press conference in May. At the time, his tone was viewed as one of outrage. The endorsement suggests that it may have been something more like jealous admiration.

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CityLab: Welcome to the World's First 'Waste Supermarket'

It’s not just the concept behind Britain’s first “waste supermarket” that’s impressive, it’s also the project’s sheer scale. Run by food-waste-busting nonprofit the Real Junk Food Project, this pay-what-you-can store housed in a Leeds warehouse connects local shoppers with food donated by supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers that would otherwise end up in the trash. Set up this summer, the store is already channeling a remarkable volume of otherwise wasted resources to people who need them, according to co-founder Adam Smith. [...]

What the Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP) has dubbed an “anti-supermarket” is really just the tip of their vast iceberg of discarded provisions: The group has a created a network of 126 cafés across seven countries, all serving meals on a “Pay as You Feel” basis. The project fixes no prices to goods, but many patrons contribute, and both the project’s main website and sites run by individual cafes accept donations. TRJFP set up their first café in Leeds in 2013, serving meals made with food destined to be thrown away by stores or restaurants. The U.S. is next on their expansion plans, as the project has already opened a pop-up café in Buffalo, New York, and hopes to expand nationwide in 2017. [...]

The success of such efforts is cheering, but it also reflects the enormity of the food waste problem, which is estimated to devour about a third of the edible food produced each year globally. Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco, threw away the equivalent of 119 million meals last year. And Smith is outspoken about the needless, grand-scale squandering of resources that is built into the business model of the grocery industry. “I’m sick to death of the media and supermarkets who say it’s all to do with consumers,” he told The Guardian. “It’s nothing to do with them. We didn’t want this saturation of supermarkets on our high street selling food 24 hours day, manipulating us into purchasing more.”

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Independent: Paris approves controversial plan to ban cars along stretch of River Seine

A controversial plan to pedestrianise a stretch of road running alongside the Seine River through central Paris has been approved by the city council.

The "historic" scheme, which has been described by the Mayor of Paris as "the end of an urban motorway and the taking back of the Seine", will see 3.3km of an express way on the Right Bank of the river permanently shut to vehicles, in an effort to tackle pollution in the city.

The length of road stretching from Tuileries gardens near the Louvre to the Henri-IV tunnel near the Bastille, which is part of a UNESCO world heritage site, was previously used by around 43,000 cars a day, Le Monde reports.

The project, expected to cost around €8 million, will add wooden walkways and foliage to the river bank, while leaving a lane for emergency vehicles. [...]

Medical experts have blamed air pollution for 2,500 deaths each year in the city and 6,600 in the greater metropolitan area. 

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FiveThirtyEight: The Income Gap Began To Narrow Under Obama

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don’t agree on much. But there’s one theme that’s central to both of their campaigns: The U.S. economy too often benefits the powerful few over the struggling many. Trump has pledged to be the “voice” of the masses fighting against a “rigged” system. Clinton, though less fiery in her rhetoric than either Trump or Bernie Sanders, her former Democratic rival, has pledged to make the “super-rich” start paying “their fair share.” As I wrote last month, the 2016 election has marked a distinct shift in the political message of both parties, away from promises to grow the economic pie and toward discussions of how to divide it up more fairly. [...]

In recent years, inequality has shifted from being an issue that mostly concerns the political left to one that worries even mainstream economists. Groups such as the International Monetary Fund and the OECD have released reports arguing that a greater concentration of wealth among the rich leads to slower overall economic growth. And while economists disagree about the causes and consequences of rising inequality (and, even more, what to do about it), there is relatively widespread agreement that the recent trend of explosive income growth among top earners and minimal gains for everyone else is unhealthy for the economy. [...]

The CEA report argues that Obama has fought inequality in three main ways. First, the administration’s actions during the recession — extending unemployment benefits, temporarily cutting payroll taxes to stimulate growth and bailing out the auto industry, among others — kept unemployment lower than it would otherwise have been. Since recessions tend to hit the lowest-earning workers hardest, policies that mitigate their impact will tend to reduce inequality. Second, the CEA argues that the Affordable Care Act, by making health insurance more affordable for and accessible to low-income workers, has greatly reduced disparities in health care. And third, the CEA argues that the administration’s tax policies — which raised taxes on the rich, cut them for the middle class and expanded programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit that help poor families — made the tax code more progressive. All told, the CEA estimates that the poorest fifth of American households will earn 18 percent more in 2017 than they would have without the administration’s policies.

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CityLab: Germany Has the World's First Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Train

When it comes to rail innovations, it’s usually the fastest, longest and most expensive new connections or rolling stock that grab people’s attention. Next year, however, Germany will buck that trend with something that’s both ground-breaking and singularly modest. German rail’s most innovative project for 2017 won’t go especially fast, and you’ve probably never heard of the cities it will link. It will still revolutionize rail travel, quite possibly across the world, with one dramatic change. In December 2017, Germany will launch the first ever passenger rail service powered by hydrogen.

Unveiled by French manufacturers Alstom this month, the new Coradia iLint will feature a motor that gains its power from a hydrogen tank and a fuel cell. Stored in a tank large enough to fuel a 497-mile journey, the hydrogen’s chemical energy will be converted into electricity by the fuel cell, propelling the train at up to 87 miles per hour. Any energy not used immediately is stored in Lithium batteries attached to the car bottom. Producing nothing but steam as a by-product, the motor will run far more quietly and cleanly than a diesel engine. What’s more, the train’s new fuel source will effectively make it carbon-neutral, albeit in a roundabout sort of way. [...]

This new hydrogen train is thus perfect for shorter, quieter stretches of the network that electrification hasn’t yet reached. Germany’s first Coradia iLint models are thus being tried out first on an internationally obscure 60-mile link between Buxtehude, a city lying just beyond Hamburg’s southern suburbs, and the small port and beach town of Cuxhaven. Outside this region, three other German states signed letters of intent in 2014 expressing a serious interest in adopting the model, and so the trains could soon be a fixture across many of Germany’s smaller lines.

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The Intercept: Here Are Eight Policies That Can Prevent Police Killings

With 788 people killed by police this year alone, death at the hands of law enforcement has become so routine in this country that it risks becoming expected and predictable, as if it were inevitable. Every time a new video emerges, anger soars, as do calls to end police violence. Then invariably, within days or sometimes mere hours, police somewhere else kill again. [...]

But as commonplace as they have become, police killings are neither inevitable nor even that hard to prevent, and a new report released today suggests that curbing police violence is really not rocket science when departments and local officials are committed to doing it.

The “Police Use of Force Project” is an initiative of Campaign Zero, a group that came together in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests to research and recommend solutions to end death at the hands of police. Not surprisingly, their latest research showed that police departments that implement stricter use of force regulations kill significantly fewer people. [...]

But even common-sense practices such as de-escalating situations or exhausting alternatives before resorting to deadly force were required, respectively, of only 34 and 31 of the 91 departments examined. Only 30 departments required officers to intervene to stop a colleague from exercising excessive force, and only 15 required officers to report on all uses of force, including threatening civilians with a firearm.

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Good Food: This Infographic Shows How Only 10 Companies Own All The World’s Food Brands

Just when you think there’s no end to the diversity of junk food lining supermarket aisles, an insanely detailed infographic comes along to set us all straight. Out of the hundreds of products at our disposal, only ten major corporations manufacture the bulk of what we toss in our shopping carts.

So whether you’re looking to stock up on anything from orange soda to latte-flavored potato chips, Mondelez, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, and Unilever own just about everything you could hope to buy. It seems that six degrees of separation theory has been proven after all, if only because we all drink Diet Coke every now and then.

In order to visually elucidate that point, Oxfam International created a comprehensive infographic that reveals the extensive reach of the “Big 10” food and beverage companies. Unlikely ties between brands we largely don’t associate with one another show how easy it is to be misinformed about the American food system. For example, PepsiCo produces Quaker granola bars, and Nestlé makes Kit Kat bars but also frozen California Pizza Kitchen pies. To the surprise of many, Pineapple Fanta isn’t sourced straight from the mythical Fanta Islands, but canned right alongside Barq’s root beer at the Coca-Cola factory.

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