The U.S. went into a damage control mode to avoid an escalation with NATO ally Turkey after the shooting of a Turkish drone in northern Syria. — The U.S. officials scrambled on Thursday to assuage the nerves of their Turkish allies after an American F-16 fighter jet shot down an armed Turkish drone in northern Syria, where the spotted UAV was hovering very close to a U.S. base. It was the first time a NATO ally took…

While liberalism was ascendant during the tumultuous 1960s, the American suburbs witnessed a silent revolution: the emergence of a grassroots conservative movement. — As the legacy of the New Deal welfare state became entrenched with the construction of a warfare state during the Second World War and early in the Cold War, the triumph of liberalism seemed an uncontested reality for several decades. The 1950s and 1960s saw the inexorable march of liberal…

The U.S. involvement in World War One unravels the myth of exceptional American democracy as the Wilson administration unleashed a sweeping crackdown against dissent, German-Americans, and socialists on the home front. — With the slogan “to end all wars,” the U.S. entered the First World War during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who is still held in high regard among International Relations theorists as one of the early liberal interventionists in the service of a great cause. Wilson is seen as a…

Even after many decades since it was published, the anti-war novel still keeps readers under its spell. — Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Dance, a fictionalized account of the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945, serves as a personal reckoning for novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who himself was an American POW held in captivity in a shelter in the city when the…

Less than a day after a nationalist politician broke away from an electoral alliance in a dispute over candidacy for the May presidential election, she got a rebuke from the mayors she proposed for nomination. — Only less than a day after IYI Party leader Meral Aksener split from the notoriously dysfunctional opposition alliance in a dispute over nominating the joint candidate for the upcoming presidential election in May, the names in her mind for nomination offered a stinging rebuke to the veteran nationalist politician. In…

In the chaos that followed an apocalyptic earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Turkish vigilantes deliver mob justice to some suspected looters and Syrians. — At least four people were reportedly killed after an angry mob pulled out the passengers of a pick-up truck loaded with materials believed to be pilfered from the quake-hit city of Antakya in southern Turkey on Saturday. The unhinged crowd brutally rounded up four “suspected looters” while the police sought…

More than 1,300 people were killed after an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 hit southern Turkey and northern Syria early Monday. — More than 1,300 were killed and thousands were injured as a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday, international media reported. The United States Geological Survey warned of significant casualties. …

What was once believed to be a game changer during the critical moments of the Turkish coup, Erdogan’s FaceTime call would be a staged one. — When the putschist troops commandeered tanks and occupied key positions in Ankara and Istanbul in an ill-fated attempt to remove Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government from power on the night of July 15 in 2016, President Erdogan did something unexpected: he connected to an anchorwoman on CNN’s Turkish offshoot via a…

Although belated, the glimmer of hope and a hint of justice emerges for some Turkish trainees who were wrongfully convicted in mass trials after the 2016 coup. — Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals ordered the release of more than 66 Turkish Air Force Academy trainees, who were serving life in prison over alleged involvement in an abortive coup in 2016, overturning a verdict by a lower court in Istanbul.