Religion

The Turkey of today, honestly speaking, is a depressing country. The political scene is madly polarized, and the language of hate and vengeance dominates the public scene. Certain civil liberties are shrinking and there is a visible political tendency to diminish them even more.

Nigerian police have banned protests in the capital Abuja by supporters of the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants as the activists vowed to challenge the "illegal" move.
      

The month of May opened and closed violently in Turkey. No doubt it will be so for years to come. We had the May Day demonstrations that were repressed by excessive police force first, and finally the Gezi Park demonstrations that were repressed by police brutality, as the whole world saw over the weekend.

Former Golden Dawn legislator Stathis Boukouras on Monday refused to answer magistrates’ questions when he faced them on charges of illegal possession of a weapon and insisted that he had been wrongly implicated in crimes linked to the neo-Nazi party, claiming to have tried to hang himself twice in pretrial custody.

Greek Public Order Minister Nikos Denidas on Monday signed an agreement with the head of the local mission of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Daniel Esdras, for a new program of voluntary repatriations for irregular migrants.

A group that has been staging a sit-in protest in front of the Diyarbakır Municipality to demand that the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) release their children, who recently joined the PKK, are continuing their protest across the road, following a scuffle with workers at the municipality.

Serbian patriarch visits Albania, nationalist protest

TIRANA -- Leaders of Orthodox Christian churches - including a delegation of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) headed by Patriarch Irinej - were in Albania on Sunday.

They consecrated the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in the country's capital, Tirana.

The early morning prayers of several thousand of devout Muslims outside the Hagia Sophia Museum Saturday (May 31) sent multiple messages to everybody who is trying to decipher the complexity of present Turkish politics.

May 31 marked the first anniversary of the Gezi protests with a plethora of events online and onsite in parks across the country. Facebook events, timelines and compilations online were accompanied by the revival of the Gezi forums, the screening of an anticipated documentary in parks and more

A Sudanese woman sentenced to death for converting to Christianity is expected to be released soon, a government official said on May 31, after Khartoum came under diplomatic pressure to halt her execution.