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Islamic State Protests Turn Violent in Istanbul

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Kurdish protesters clashed with police in Turkey on Tuesday and forced their way into the European Parliament in Brussels, part of Europe-wide demonstrations against the Islamic State group's advance on a town on the Syrian-Turkish border.

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5. US hits Islamic State group in both Syria and Iraq Associated Press

One protester in Turkey was reported killed.

The activists are demanding more help for the besieged Kurdish forces struggling to hold onto the Syrian town of Kobani. Some European countries are arming the Kurds, and the American-led coalition is carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic extremists, but protesters say it isn't enough.

A demonstrator in Cyprus urged the coalition to "hit the jihadists harder" so that Kurdish forces can hold the town.

Tensions are especially high in Turkey, where Kurds have fought a 3-decade-long battle for autonomy and where Syria's violence has taken an especially heavy toll.

Protests were reported in cities across Turkey on Tuesday, after Islamic State fighters backed by tanks and artillery engaged in heavy street battles with the town's Kurdish defenders.

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Kurdish protesters wearing an apron calling for support to save the Syrian town of Kobani from being …

A 25-year-old protester was reported killed Tuesday in the town of Varto. The private Dogan news agency said he was killed by gunfire, while the state-run Anadolu Agency reported that he was hit by a gas canister. The pro-Kurdish Firat news agency also reported the death.

Police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Istanbul and in the desert town of Kucuk Kenderciler, near Kobani on the Turkish side of the border. One person in Istanbul was hospitalized after being hit in the head by a gas canister, Dogan reported.

Some protesters shouted "Murderer ISIS!" and accused Turkey's government of collaborating with the Islamic militants.

Authorities declared a curfew in six towns in the southeastern province of Mardin, the Anadolu Agency reported.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds live elsewhere in Europe, and mobilized quickly via social networks to stage protests after the advance on Kobani. Some European Kurds have gone to the Mideast recently to join Kurdish forces.

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Turkish riot police detain protesters as they use tear gas to disperse people who were protesting ag …

In Brussels on Tuesday, about 50 protesters smashed a glass door and pushed past police to get into the European Parliament. Once inside, some protesters were received by Parliament President Martin Schulz, who promised to discuss the Kurds' plight with NATO and EU leaders.

In Germany, home to Western Europe's largest Kurdish population, about 600 people demonstrated in Berlin on Tuesday, according to police. Hundreds demonstrated in other German cities. Austria, too, saw protests.

Kurds peacefully occupied the Dutch Parliament for several hours Monday night, and met Tuesday with legislators to press for more Dutch action against the insurgents, according to local media.

The Netherlands has sent six F-16 fighter jets to conduct airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq, but says it does not see a mandate for striking in Syria.

France, too, is firing airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Iraq but not in Syria, wary of implications on international efforts against President Bashar Assad.

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Turkish forces fire tear gas to disperse Kurds on the outskirts of Suruc, at the Turkey-Syria border …

"We don't understand why France is acting in Kurdistan in Iraq and not Kurdistan in Syria," said Fidan Unlubayir of the Federation of Kurdish Associations of France.

Kurds protested overnight at the French Parliament and plan another protest Tuesday.

Kurds also staged impromptu protests against the Islamic State fighters in Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

On Monday, protesters at the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus urged the international coalition to provide heavy weaponry to Kurdish fighters and forge a military cooperation pact with the Kurdish group YPG.

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Angela Charlton reported from Paris. Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Raf Casert in Brussels, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jari Tanner in Tallinn and Mike Corder in The Hague contributed to this report.

Demonstrators clash with Turkish police and force their way into the European Parliament in Brussels.
'Hit the jihadists harder'

Shocking New Snowden Leaks That Will Change the World!

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — A North Korean official publicly acknowledged to the international community the existence of his country's "reform through labor" camps Tuesday, a mention that appeared to come in response to a highly critical U.N. human rights report earlier this year.

Diplomats for the reclusive, impoverished country also told reporters that a top North Korea official has visited the headquarters of the European Union and expressed interest in dialogue, with discussions on human rights expected next year.

North Korea's deputy U.N. ambassador Ri Tong Il said the secretary of his country's ruling Workers' Party had visited the EU, and that "we are expecting end of this year to open political dialogue between the two sides." The human rights dialogue would follow.

In Brussels, an EU official confirmed a recent North Korea meeting with the EU's top human rights official, Stavros Lambrinidis, but said any dialogue currently planned is limited to rights issues.

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, "no prison, things like that."

But he briefly discussed the "reform through labor" camps. "Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps — no, detention centers — where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings," he said.

Such "re-education" labor camps are for common offenders and some political prisoners, but most political prisoners are held in a harsher system of political prison camps.

The North Korean officials took several questions but did not respond to one about the health of leader Kim Jong Un, who has made no public appearances since Sept. 3 and skipped a high-profile recent event he usually attends.

The officials said they don't oppose human rights dialogue as long as the issue isn't used as a "tool for interference." Their briefing seemed timed in advance of the latest resolution on North Korea and human rights that the EU and Japan put to the U.N. General Assembly every year.

The North Korean briefing concerned a lengthy human rights report it released last month in response to a U.N. commission of inquiry that concluded the authoritarian government had committed crimes against humanity. "We dare say that the case of human rights in the DPRK exceeds all others in duration, intensity and horror," commission head Michael Kirby told the U.N. Security Council in April.

The report's release in February put the North on the defensive. Its public acknowledgement Tuesday of the reform camps, and its overture to the EU rights chief, were signs that Pyongyang now realizes the discussion of its human rights record won't fade away, said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

He said the mention of the reform camps was the first direct acknowledgement by a North Korean official speaking before an international audience. Last month, a senior court official mentioned the reform camps' existence in an interview with the pro-Pyongyang website Minjok Tongshin.

"While the North Korean human rights record remains abysmal, it is very important that senior North Korean officials are now speaking about human rights, and expressing even pro forma interest in dialogue," Scarlatoiu said in an email. "The North Korean strategic approach to human rights issues used to be to simply ignore reports by international NGOs, government agencies or U.N. bodies. Human rights used to just go away, out-competed by nukes, missiles, and military provocations."

While he called the mention of the reform through labor camps "a modest step in the right direction," he stressed that this wasn't an acknowledgement by North Korea of the harsher system of political prison camps, which are estimated to hold 120,000 people.

The North's own report on its human rights system accuses the United States and its allies of a campaign aimed at interfering in Pyongyang's affairs "and eventually overthrowing the social system by fabricating 'human rights issue' of the DPRK to mislead international opinions," its preface says.

Param-Preet Singh, a senior counsel for Human Rights Watch who attended the briefing along with a number of diplomats from other countries, said the significance of the event was that North Korea held it at all. The country used to be seen as "impervious to pressure," she said.

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Associated Press writer Juergen Baetz in Brussels contributed to this report.

Related Video

N. Korea acknowledges labor camps for first time

A North Korean diplomat mentions "reform through labor" camps in response to a critical human rights report.
Possible next step

Associated Press Videos
Raw: Airstrike Hits Near Kobani

By Daren Butler and Jonny Hogg

MURSITPINAR Turkey/ANKARA (Reuters) - At least 19 people were reported killed in riots across Turkey, the deadliest street unrest in years, after the Kurdish minority rose up in fury at the government's refusal to protect a besieged Syrian town from Islamic State.

Street battles raged between Kurdish protesters and police across Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, as the fallout from war in Syria and Iraq threatened to unravel the NATO member's own delicate peace process. There were also clashes in the commercial hub Istanbul and capital Ankara.

Across the frontier, U.S.-led air strikes appeared to have pushed Islamic State fighters back to the edges of the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani, which the militants have been poised to capture this week after a three-week siege.

Washington said its war planes, along with those of coalition ally the United Arab Emirates, had struck nine targets in Syria, including six near Kobani that hit Islamic State artillery and armoured vehicles. It also struck Iraq five times.

Nevertheless, Kobani remained under intense bombardment from Islamic State positions within sight of Turkish tanks that have so far done nothing to help.

ISIS advances; FBI public pleaPlay video

U.S. officials were quoted expressing impatience with the Turks for refusing to join the military coalition against Islamic State fighters who have seized much of Syria and Iraq. Turkey says it could join, but only if Washington agrees to use force against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as well as against the Sunni Muslim jihadists fighting against him.

Turkey's own Kurds say President Tayyip Erdogan is stalling while their brethren are killed in Kobani.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse demonstrators who burnt cars and tyres. Authorities imposed curfews in at least five provinces, the first time such measures have been used widely since the early 1990s, local media said.

Ten people died in clashes in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey's southeast, according to Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker. In live televised comments, he said an all-day curfew imposed in the city from Tuesday night would be reviewed on Wednesday.

Pockets of protesters defying the curfew clashed with security forces there later on Wednesday, local media reported.

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A damaged school building, which was used by Kurdish fighters as a base, is seen in al-Aziza village …

Others died in clashes between protesters and police in the eastern provinces of Mus, Siirt and Batman. DHA news agency reported a death toll of 19 from two days of clashes.

The Istanbul governor's office reported 30 people wounded, including eight police officers, and 98 people detained in "illegal protests" in Turkey's biggest city.

Unrest spread to other countries with Kurdish and Turkish populations. Police in Germany said 14 people were hurt in clashes there between Kurds and Islamists.

The unrest in Turkey, which has NATO's second largest army, exposes the difficulty Washington has faced in creating a coalition of countries to intervene against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, two countries with complex, multi-sided civil wars in which every country in the region has a stake.

The advance by the jihadists of Islamic State in northern Syria drove 180,000 of the area's mostly Kurdish inhabitants to flee into adjoining Turkey.

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An Islamic State fighter (L) mans a checkpoint used by Kurdish fighters in al-Jurn village in the co …

BLACK FLAG

Islamic State fighters hoisted their black flag on the eastern edge of the town on Monday. Since then, U.S.-led airstrikes have been redoubled, and the town's defenders say fighters have been pushed back.

Intense gunfire and loud explosions could be heard on Wednesday morning from across the Turkish border, and huge plumes of grey smoke and dust rose above the town, where the United Nations says only a few hundred inhabitants remain.

"They are now outside the entrances of the city of Kobani. The shelling and bombardment was very effective and as a result of it, IS have been pushed from many positions," Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister of the Kurdish-run Kobani district administration, told Reuters by phone.

"This is their biggest retreat since their entry into the city and we can consider this as the beginning of the countdown of their retreat from the area."

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An Islamic State fighter sits at a checkpoint used by Kurdish fighters in al-Jurn village in the cou …

Kurdish media reported that YPG fighters had thwarted an attempted Islamic State car bombing on positions in Kobani, saying the vehicle had detonated before it reached its target.

An Islamic State source on Twitter claimed the attack had destroyed a police station where Kurdish forces were based. The attack could not be independently verified, but a huge explosion could be seen from across the Turkish border, sending a mushroom cloud high into the sky above the town.

Islamic State has been advancing on the strategically important town from three sides and pounding it with artillery despite dogged resistance from heavily outgunned Kurdish forces.

The Turkish parliament voted last week to authorise cross-border intervention, but Erdogan and his government have so far held back, saying they will join military action only as part of an alliance that also confronts Assad.

Erdogan wants the alliance to enforce a "no fly zone" to prevent Assad's air force flying over Syrian territory near the Turkish border and create a safe area for an estimated 1.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey to return. Otherwise, he says, Turkish military action would only make the situation worse.

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The wreckage of a vehicle is seen at a base used by Kurdish fighters after Islamic State fighters to …

Washington, which has so far managed to bomb Islamic State positions in Syria without Assad raising objections, has not agreed to expand the mission to confront the Syrian leader.

U.S. IMPATIENCE

The conflict has already opened up a fissure in relations between the United States and Turkey, its most powerful ally in the area. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was forced to apologise last week after Erdogan took umbrage at comments Biden made at Harvard University, in which he blamed Turkey's open borders for allowing Islamic State to bring in recruits.

An unnamed senior U.S. official told the New York Times on Tuesday that there was "growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border".

"This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone's throw from their border," the official said.

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A deserted Kurdish village is seen in the eastern countryside of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, …

At the same time, official diplomacy intensified. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had spoken with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday night and Tuesday morning, and said Turkey was "determining what larger role they will play".

Retired U.S. General John Allen, charged with building a coalition against Islamic State after it seized about a third of neighbouring Iraq, was due in Turkey this week.

Ankara said on Tuesday it had urged Washington to step up air strikes against Islamic State to halt its advance on Kobani.

But, while taking in Kobani's refugees and treating its wounded, Turkey has deep reservations about deploying its own army in Syria. Beyond becoming a target for Islamic State, which is active along much of Syria's 900 km (550 mile) border with Turkey, it fears being sucked into Syria's three-year-old civil war and perhaps even having to confront Syria's formidable army.

It also distrusts Syria's Kurds, whom it sees as allies of its own Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which waged a decades-long insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in which around 40,000 people were killed.

The PKK's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan has said any massacre of Kurds in Kobani would doom a fragile peace process with the Turkish authorities, one of the most important initiatives of Erdogan's decade in power.

The street protests across Turkey were already making the prospect of reconciliation with nationalists seem more remote, as protesters set fire to Turkish flags and attacked statues of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the HDP, Turkey's leading Kurdish party, condemned such acts as "provocations carried out to prevent help coming to the east (Kobani) from the west".

(Reporting by Daren Butler, Humeyra Pamuk and Jonny Hogg in Turkey and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Writing by Kevin Liffey and Peter Graff)

First, the truth:

After a summer of seasonal melting, on Sept. 17, 2014, Arctic sea-ice extent* likely hit its minimum for the year. The official word is that it was measured at 5.02 million square kilometers (1.94 million square miles). This is the sixth-lowest minimum since satellite records began in 1979.

It also fits right in with the overall declining trend of Arctic sea ice:

As you can see, back in the late ’70s there used to be about 7.5 million square kilometers when ice hit its September minimum. That has dropped to about 5 million now, a decline of 30 percent. As you can also see from the graph, the past eight years have all seen lower ice extent than in the era previous.

This is due to global warming, overall heating of our planet due to human pollution. Dumping 40 billion extra tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year will do that to a planet.

Obviously, there’s no way to see this as good news.

Obviously.

Now, the legerdemain:

Oh, you foolish sheeple. Of course we can see this as good news.

For example, look at the minimum for 2012: It was 3.41 million square kilometers. But the very next year the minimum was much higher, 5.1 million square kilometers. That’s an increase of more than 40 percent! We’re on the road to recovery! Even this year’s minimum is far higher than it was in 2012, so obviously we’re doing great.

Back to the truth:

That’s a pile of horse manure. 2012 saw very unusual circumstances which led to far more melting then normal, so using it as a base point for comparison is unfair, to say the least. It would be just as unfair to look at the unusually large minimum in 1996 and say we had a huge drop after it. You have to look at overall trends. That’s why the blue line is there, and that’s how we know we’re in trouble. That line is heading down.

More shenanigans:

Ah, but that’s only the North Pole. At the South Pole, where it’s winter, Antarctica reached a record sea-ice extent! It surpassed 20 million square kilometers for the first time on record! So much for global warming.

The inconvenient truth:

Part of that is actually true: Antarctic sea ice is at a record high. However, it doesn’t matter overall. That’s because Antarctica is a continent, a huge mass of land. Every year, sea ice around it comes (in winter) and goes (in summer), and over time tends to average out.

Since Antarctica is a continent, it makes a lot more sense to see what’s happening on land, not sea, since that ice should be more permanent (or at least not as ephemeral). But what we see there isn’t good at all.

Land ice in Antarctica is melting. Rapidly. Like, to the tune of 159 billion tons per year. In fact, West Antarctica has lost so much ice that it’s measurably changed the Earth’s gravity in that area!

Yet even more fertilizer:

But that’s West Antarctica. In the east, ice has actually increased!

Sadly, no:

That was kinda sorta true for a while but is misleading. First, warming waters around Antarctica means more moisture to create snow. Wind blows that around, and some of it fell in East Antarctica, creating mild ice increase.

Note the word “mild.” It wasn’t nearly enough to offset the tremendous loss happening in the west. And now we’re actually seeing increased ice loss in the east, too.

And don’t forget Greenland, back in the north. It’s losing ice rapidly as well.

One more bit of smoke and mirrors:

So what if we lose ice in the Arctic? It won’t increase sea levels, and it means we’ll have easier access to shipping routes!

Long, drawn-out sigh:

That’s more baloney, as Jon Stewart aptly showed recently. Losing land ice means sea levels will rise, and if we lose a lot of ice in Greenland and Antarctica — which we are very much on track for doing — sea levels could rise several meters. That would be catastrophic. Incidentally, salty sea water and clean melt water have different densities, so losing sea ice does in fact raise sea levels, though not as much as land ice loss.

By the way, some fossil fuel companies are excited about Arctic sea-ice loss,because it gives them easier access to oil under the sea in the north. BANG! There goes my irony gland again.

So what does this all mean? Ice loss is an obvious indicator of a warming planet. Both poles are melting, so there you go. And it’s a bigger problem than just rising sea levels (which is a very, very big problem): Northern sea ice has been shown to affect overall weather patterns. Those bone-chilling cold snaps the U.S. East Coast has seen recently, heat waves in Alaska, and more are quite possibly connected to a weakening boreal jet stream due to warmer waters in the Arctic.

Got it? We’re destabilizing the climate system of our entire planet. We don’t know what exactly will happen as waters warm, as ice melts, as temperatures rise over years and decades. But we do know it means big changes, and we depend on the climate the way it is to support the seven billion souls on Earth, and those who will come after.

Monkeying around with our own planet is insane. Lying about it is even worse. We need to take global warming seriously, and we need to take action.

*“Extent” is essentially how much area of the Arctic was covered by ice; technically, though, area and extent are slightly different.

This story first appeared on Slate as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.