Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media, and Power in Turkey

In November 2013, a Freedom House delegation traveled to Turkey to meet with journalists, NGOs, business leaders, and senior government officials about the deteriorating state of media freedom in the country. The delegation's objective, and the plan for this report, was to investigate reports of government efforts to pressure and intimidate journalists and of overly close relationships between media owners and government, which, along with bad laws and overly aggressive prosecutors, have muzzled objective reporting in Turkey.Since November, events in Turkey have taken a severe turn for the worse. The police raids that revealed a corruption scandal on December 17, and the allegations of massive bidrigging and money laundering by people at the highest levels of the government, have sparked a frantic crackdown by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party. More journalists have been fired for speaking out. Hundreds of police officers and prosecutors have been fired or relocated across the country. Amendments to the new Internet regulation law proposed by the government would make it possible for officials to block websites without court orders. The government is also threatening the separation of powers by putting the judiciary, including criminal investigations, under direct control of the Ministry of Justice. The crisis of democracy in Turkey is not a future problem -- it is right here, right now.This report on the media recognizes that what is happening in Turkey is bigger than one institution and part of a long history that continues to shape current events. The media in Turkey have always been close to the state; as recently as 1997, large media organizations were co-opted by the military to subvert a democratically elected government. The AK Party was formed in the wake of those events. But even as it has tamed the military, the AKP has been unable to resist the temptations of authoritarianism embedded in the state the military helped create. Over the past seven years, the government has increasingly employed a variety of strong-arm tactics to suppress the media's proper role as a check on power. Some of the most disturbing efforts include the following:Intimidation: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an frequently attacks journalists by name after they write critical commentary. In several well-known cases, like those of Hasan Cemal and Nuray Mert, journalists have lost their jobs after these public attacks. Sympathetic courts hand out convictions in defamation cases for criticism.Mass firings: At least 59 journalists were fired or forced out in retaliation for their coverage of last summer's Gezi Park protests. The December corruption scandal has produced another string of firings of prominent columnists.Buying off or forcing out media moguls: Holding companies sympathetic to the government receive billions of dollars in government contracts, often through government bodies housed in the prime minister's office. Companies with media outlets critical of the government have been targets of tax investigations, forced to pay large fines, and likely disadvantaged in public tenders.Wiretapping: The National Security Organization has wiretapped journalists covering national security stories, using false names on the warrants in order to avoid judicial scrutiny.Imprisonment: Dozens of journalists remain imprisoned under broadly defined antiterrorism laws. A majority of those in prison are Kurds, and some analysts believe the government is using them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Kurdish PKKThese tactics are unacceptable in a democracy. They deny Turkish citizens full access to information and constrain a healthy political debate. Journalists and government officials alike acknowledge that reporters and news organizations have practiced self-censorship to avoid angering the government, and especially Prime Minister Erdogan.The intentional weakening of Turkey's democratic institutions, including attempts to bully and censor Turkey's media, should and must be a matter of deep concern for the United States and the European Union. As the AKParty's internal coalition has grown more fragile, Erdogan has used his leverage over the media to push issues of public morality and religion and to squelch public debate of the accountability of his government. The result is an increasingly polarized political arena and society.Freedom House calls on the government of Turkey to recognize that in a democracy, a free press and other independent institutions play a very important role. There are clear and concrete steps the Turkish government must take to end the intimidation and corruption of Turkey's media. Chief among these are the following:Cease threats against journalists.Repeal the criminal defamation law and overly broad antiterrorism and "criminal organization" laws that have been used to jail dozens of journalists.Comply with European and international standards in procurement practices in order to reduce the incentive for media owners to curry favor by distorting the news. Turkish media owners themselves must make a commitment to support changes in procurement practices if they are to win back the trust of Turkey's citizens.Although building a resilient democracy is fundamentally up to Turkish citizens, the international community cannot afford to be bystanders. The European Union and the OSCE have raised strong concerns about government pressure on Turkey's media, and the EU's warnings against governmental overreach have been pointed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the United States. The Obama administration has been far too slow to realize the seriousness of the threat to Turkey's democracy. U.S. criticism of the Turkish government's recent actions has come from the State Department spokesperson and White House press secretary, not from the high-ranking officials who need to be engaged in responding to a crisis of this scale. Where European governments and institutions have been specifically and publicly engaged with the government over the crisis, the Obama administration has avoided the difficult issues. It is time to speak frankly and with seriousness about the growing threat to democracy in Turkey, and to place freedom of expression and democracy at the center of the policy relationship

The Universe at Extreme Scale: Multi-Petaflop Sky Simulation on the BG/Q

Remarkable observational advances have established a compelling cross-validated model of the Universe. Yet, two key pillars of this model -- dark matter and dark energy -- remain mysterious. Sky surveys that map billions of galaxies to explore the `Dark Universe', demand a corresponding extreme-scale simulation capability; the HACC (Hybrid/Hardware Accelerated Cosmology Code) framework has been designed to deliver this level of performance now, and into the future. With its novel algorithmic structure, HACC allows flexible tuning across diverse architectures, including accelerated and multi-core systems. On the IBM BG/Q, HACC attains unprecedented scalable performance -- currently 13.94 PFlops at 69.2% of peak and 90% parallel efficiency on 1,572,864 cores with an equal number of MPI ranks, and a concurrency of 6.3 million. This level of performance was achieved at extreme problem sizes, including a benchmark run with more than 3.6 trillion particles, significantly larger than any cosmological simulation yet performed.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, final version of paper for talk presented at SC1

Estimation of stratospheric input to the Arctic troposphere: 7Be and 10Be in aerosols at Alert, Canada

Concentrations of 7Be and 210Pb in 2 years of weekly high-volume aerosol samples collected at Alert, Northwest Territories, Canada, showed pronounced seasonal variations. We observed a broad winter peak in 210Pb concentration and a spring peak in 7Be. These peaks were similar in magnitude and duration to previously reported results for a number of stations in the Arctic Basin. Beryllium 10 concentrations (determined only during the first year of this study) were well correlated with those of 7Be; the atom ratio 10Be/7Be was nearly constant at 2.2 throughout the year. This relatively high value of 10Be/7Be indicates that the stratosphere must constitute an important source of both Be isotopes in the Arctic troposphere throughout the year. A simple mixing model based on the small seasonal variations of 10Be/7Be indicates an approximately twofold increase of stratospheric influence in the free troposphere in late summer. The spring maxima in concentrations of both Be isotopes at the surface apparently reflect vertical mixing in rather than stratospheric injections into the troposphere. We have merged the results of the Be-based mixing model with weekly O3 soundings to assess Arctic stratospheric impact on the surface O3 budget at Alert. The resulting estimates indicate that stratospheric inputs can account for a maximum of 10-15% of the 03 at the surface in spring and for less during the rest of the year. These estimates are most uncertain during the winter. The combination of Be isotopic measurements and O3 vertical profiles could allow quantification of the contributions of O3 from the Arctic stratosphere and lower latitude regions to the O3 budget in the Arctic troposphere. Although at present the lack of a quantitative understanding of the temporal variation of O3 lifetime in the Arctic troposphere precludes making definitive calculations, qualitative examples of the power of this approach are given

A_(N)-type Dunkl operators and new spin Calogero-Sutherland models

A new family of AN-type Dunkl operators preserving a polynomial subspace of finite dimension is constructed. Using a general quadratic combination of these operators and the usual Dunkl operators, several new families of exactly and quasi-exactly solvable quantum spin Calogero-Sutherland models are obtained. These include, in particular, three families of quasi-exactly solvable elliptic spin Hamiltonians

The Mira-Titan Universe: Precision Predictions for Dark Energy Surveys

Ground and space-based sky surveys enable powerful cosmological probes based on measurements of galaxy properties and the distribution of galaxies in the Universe. These probes include weak lensing, baryon acoustic oscillations, abundance of galaxy clusters, and redshift space distortions; they are essential to improving our knowledge of the nature of dark energy. On the theory and modeling front, large-scale simulations of cosmic structure formation play an important role in interpreting the observations and in the challenging task of extracting cosmological physics at the needed precision. These simulations must cover a parameter range beyond the standard six cosmological parameters and need to be run at high mass and force resolution. One key simulation-based task is the generation of accurate theoretical predictions for observables, via the method of emulation. Using a new sampling technique, we explore an 8-dimensional parameter space including massive neutrinos and a variable dark energy equation of state. We construct trial emulators using two surrogate models (the linear power spectrum and an approximate halo mass function). The new sampling method allows us to build precision emulators from just 26 cosmological models and to increase the emulator accuracy by adding new sets of simulations in a prescribed way. This allows emulator fidelity to be systematically improved as new observational data becomes available and higher accuracy is required. Finally, using one LCDM cosmology as an example, we study the demands imposed on a simulation campaign to achieve the required statistics and accuracy when building emulators for dark energy investigations.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Autonomic Cluster Management System (ACMS): A Demonstration of Autonomic Principles at Work

Cluster computing, whereby a large number of simple processors or nodes are combined together to apparently function as a single powerful computer, has emerged as a research area in its own right. The approach offers a relatively inexpensive means of achieving significant computational capabilities for high-performance computing applications, while simultaneously affording the ability to. increase that capability simply by adding more (inexpensive) processors. However, the task of manually managing and con.guring a cluster quickly becomes impossible as the cluster grows in size. Autonomic computing is a relatively new approach to managing complex systems that can potentially solve many of the problems inherent in cluster management. We describe the development of a prototype Automatic Cluster Management System (ACMS) that exploits autonomic properties in automating cluster management