In a recent article by Marcia S. Smith at spacepolicyonline we learn that:
NASA is denying all travel for NASA employees and contractors to the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) conference to be held in Istanbul, Turkey beginning just five weeks from now. The reason: security. COSPAR President Lennard Fisk worries not only about the impact on COSPAR, but the messages NASA is sending about its commitment to leadership in space science and its resolve to not let terrorism be rewarded by changing what we do.
COSPAR is the Committee on Space Research. On even-numbered years (2016, 2014...) COSPAR holds a Scientific Assembly, the 41st of which will be in Istanbul this year.
In a statement provided to SpacePolicyOnline.com, COSPAR President Len Fisk expressed his deep concerns:
NASA has cancelled all travel of NASA civil servants and contractors to the COSPAR-2016 meeting to be held in Istanbul on 30 July - 7 August. And by doing so it demonstrated that it has no intention of exerting strategic leadership in the world, and that terrorism should be rewarded. The leaders of all the major space programs will gather in Istanbul to discuss among other topics, the future of human space exploration, but NASA will be absent. The major scientists of the world will gather in Istanbul, to share the results of their research, to plan future projects, to promote international cooperation in space science, but NASA civil servants and NASA sponsored contractors will be absent. And for what reason: a misguided assumption that Istanbul is more dangerous than Paris, or Brussels, or Orlando, Florida, or for that matter Israel and Jordan where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently visited. Terrorism is rewarded if it causes us to cease to pursue that which is important, or for that matter our daily lives. [From Marcia S. Smith's article]
The US State Department currently has a travel warning for Turkey.
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The New York Times is reporting:
Two explosions at Turkey’s largest airport left at least 10 people dead and wounded some 20 others on Tuesday night, according to Turkish authorities and television reports.
The Turkish justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, said 10 people had been killed in an attack on Ataturk airport. He said that one attacker fired an automatic weapon before detonating explosives.
Another Turkish government official said that the police fired shots at two suspected attackers at the entryway to the airport’s international terminal, in an effort to stop them before they reached the building’s security checkpoint. The two suspects then blew themselves up, the official said.
CNN Turk reported that one suicide bomber detonated explosives inside the terminal building and another outside in a parking lot.
[...] Ataturk airport has expanded in recent years and is now the third busiest in Europe, ranked by the annual number of passengers, after Heathrow in London and Charles de Gaulle in Paris.
While normally this kind of news would not necessarily be appropriate, at least in my view, for Soylent News, I submitted it because of this story posted here on Sunday, in which NASA cancels all travel for its personnel to the COSPAR meeting in Istanbul. It seems that NASA may have been very prescient and wise.
Spacepolicyonline.com reports that
The international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) has cancelled its biennial conference for this year, which was scheduled to take place in Istanbul, Turkey from July 30-August 7. COSPAR President Lennard Fisk called it a "difficult and sad decision," but the wise course of action following this weekend's attempted coup.
[...] COSPAR was created in 1958 as part of the International Council for Science (formerly the International Council of Scientific Unions). It holds a "scientific assembly" every two years that brings together the world's top space scientists who share and discuss their recent discoveries and future plans. The 2014 COSPAR meeting was in Russia (Moscow) and the 2018 COSPAR meeting will be in the United States (Pasadena). The Space Studies Board (SSB) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is the U.S. national committee to COSPAR.
In late June, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden canceled all NASA reimbursements for travel to the conference citing security concerns based on a State Department travel advisory. At that time, many were concerned that the NASA action was sending the wrong message about responding to terrorism.
[Continues...]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @08:02AM
Murca doesn't need space research help from Turkish pederastic pedophiles! Murca can pwn space with nobody's help! Because Murca can do it all!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @08:08AM
And southern Turkey is indeed dangerous. If Istanbul is safe the warning should have excluded it but it didn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @08:14AM
With a Woman in the White House the Empire of Hillary will make the World safe for Women. Safe at last! Safe at last! Hallelujah! Safe at last!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @11:28AM
> Safe at last! Safe at last! Hallelujah! Safe at last!
This immediately made me think of Time Enough At Last (Twilight Zone). I should really finish watching that series!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rivenaleem on Monday June 27 2016, @08:35AM
I have a friend and work colleague who is just back from Istanbul. Anecdotal, for sure, however he tells me of an incident where he and his friends left their hotel and walked right into a cloud of tear gas. The Police had recently been required to intervene in a riot/disturbance, as there are groups of people with nothing better to do than cruise the local tourist areas beating up people (including tourists) they find drinking alcohol on ramadan.
It doesn't need to be a obvious terror threat to understand that the place is just not safe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @03:54PM
That kind of thing was a daily occurrence when I was in college in the US in the early 70s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @10:25PM
Bullshit.
(Score: 1, Troll) by isostatic on Monday June 27 2016, @08:38AM
Land of the free and the home of the brave
Lol
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @08:59AM
Hah, yeah...
not let terrorism be rewarded by changing what we do.
Now that would be a truly novel, even revolutionary approach for a US governmental agency. After all, the US government has spent the last 15ish years changing and/or ignoring the very core of the country's supposed beliefs and ideals in response to terrorism, more often imaginary than real. If I was a US citizen, it would make me angry, as a foreigner, it just makes me sad :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @05:06AM
It stopped making me angry not long after 9/11. The constituents deserve what they are getting. Literally the only way for the intelligent and articulate amongst us to make a difference is to either to move en-masse to a specific and sparsely populated state/other region of the US so we exert the political will to make change there. Or the more sensible option: Emigrate en-masse and after changing citizenship or renouncing it, establish a new country, possibly wrested from territory of an existing one elsewhere to establish a strong foundation for a 'future (probably not called) America'. The country we live in however is sick, mentally, just like most of the rest of the world. There is a general malaise in the population when it comes to thinking. You will often hear people spounting opinions, but on both the right and left it is mostly propaganda of their party. Few people are really looking into the events surrounding their party's candidates and/or leadership. They aren't paying attention to congress's misuse of their power to pass legislation unfavorable to their constituency. The populace is not exerting pressure on the judicial branch to either prosecute in a fair and just manner, or to judge cases on impartial evidence, rather coloring the law in a manner that best favors who they want to win (be it the prosecution, plaintiff or the defendant.)
SN and/or the Green Site have had plenty of stories covering the recent misuses, passages, and straight up abuses of law in the US. At this point in time the only real method of protesting, without simplying ending up burdened under all the laws we were brought up to hate is to leave the US, the 'homeland' that many of our teachers told us was not called a homeland because that was evil and communist. Ironic that the very teachings meant to instill in us hatred of the Soviets lack of Democracy should remind us that we have already lost our own. If the people refuse to stand alongside you and rebel, you can either hope the tide will shift in your lifetime, or you can take your first steps into a larger world in the hopes of finding or establishing a country that exhibits, elicits, or shall be forged upon your ideals.
Reflect on what I have written and for those of you from the States, think about which path you will choose to take. Your time is running out to change the country or leave before the abuses start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29 2016, @02:36AM
I, for one, have already been abused. At least as I see it. We are so close to being back to the days of witch hunting and McCarthyism. Mass hysteria around terrorism.
While I agree that the nation is sick, what's less clear is how it can be made well. For my money, the problem seems to be too much power in the hands of the state, and corruption of the state. I live in a nation where I've never really had a say in my own life, and it's a constant struggle to avoid having my life sold down the river by my "representatives".
Not sure what the solution is, but it feels like a radical curtailing of power to a more personalized level is required to get us back on track.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:01PM
Bravery and Stupidity are two very different things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @04:41PM
The boundary between bravery and stupidity is fuzzy.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday June 27 2016, @07:59PM
Yeah, and the one thing that's really really stupid to do in the face of terrorism is change your way of life
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @10:36PM
And another really stupid thing to do is to ignore warnings and travel to an airport that gets bombed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @10:28PM
Yeah, LOL. Probably overblown fear, right? Fearmongering [soylentnews.org], right?
That's why the only ones who listen to the tired whinings of people like you are other whiners.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Wednesday June 29 2016, @03:13AM
You were saying [soylentnews.org]? Must be fun living in your own little fantasy world.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday June 29 2016, @08:30AM
I don't see anything in that link to indicate America is being brave by not going to turkey.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Wednesday June 29 2016, @09:30PM
Sadly, standing up for common sense and not traveling to a place like Turkey for a scientific conference is a form of bravery these days when faced with the idiotically pathetic attempts at shaming re your comment. Fools like you seem to confuse bravery with stupidity. The only thing is, I don't see your ilk actually engaging in the stupidity you espouse. Which is kind of unfortunate since I wouldn't have had to waste 3 minutes of my time responding to your moronic drivel had you been at the Ataturk in the right spot yesterday. I can't win 'em all I guess.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday June 29 2016, @10:25PM
And had I been one of the 35 people killed on the roads in the uk this week you'd nlt have the pleasure of my response here.
I travel the world, fro. Johannesburg to Gaza city, from rio to Hong Kong, and the most dangerous place statistically that I go to is Washington DC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday June 27 2016, @09:15AM
While it is a good idea that NASA realized the danger in time, who thought organizing a major conference in an Islamic hellhole was a good idea in the first place? Turkey was heading toward the modern world for a good while, but anyone who has paid an occasional glance at the world should have seen the turn toward Islamism the last decade.
This is a good example of what seems to pass for thinking today, ignore problems and wish really really hard that everything will be sunshine and unicorns. Reality is what refuses to change regardless of how much you try to deny it. Islamists want to cut your neck, blow you up, shoot you or hold you for ransom unless you convert or pay the tax. Period. You can't reason with them, you can't threaten them and you can't ignore them. What you can do is stay out of the parts of the world they hold sway over, stop them from entering civilized lands or you can make unrelenting war on them. We lack the will to wage effective war on them so distance is the only viable defense.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @09:49AM
We already pay a religious tax to them when we buy food
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Monday June 27 2016, @11:09AM
IMO science related activities such as conferences/scientific collaborations/joint grants should be upheld as long as possible with any country in the world. Science is often the last refuge of sanity in extremist countries and the last counterweight to totalitarian regimes. On a good day it might help the moderates to reestablish their influence. My place (Netherlands) upholds collaboration with Moscow and I am in favor of it.
In this particular case, I believe, NASA had no choice but to follow the US state department's assessment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday June 27 2016, @05:45PM
Science is often the last refuge of sanity in extremist countries and the last counterweight to totalitarian regimes
Science is also the first target of extremists, and seldom ever stands up to totalitarian regimes.
Sheep to the slaughter, sacrificing your best minds is a stupid way to make a point.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday June 27 2016, @05:57PM
Bad analogy. Back in the old Soviet days it wasn't dangerous to hold a scientific conference in Moscow because the Soviets didn't want violence and had the power to enforce their wish. Like every stable State, the Soviets held a firm monopoly on the use of physical violence. Turkey has allowed the Islamists to operate openly, but doesn't have firm control over them because they want plausible deniability when they riot, kill and commit atrocities. Erdogan has intentionally destabilized his State in an effort to push its Overton Window far enough to allow him to reestablish it as an Islamic Republic.
The downside to scientific cooperation with Soviet Russia was giving them legitimacy and equivalence. And of course every such conference was a nest of spy-vs-spy activity by both sides.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Monday June 27 2016, @09:05PM
And when it comes to space and Turkey, we should be reminded that the planet (asteroid) of the Little Prince ( Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, 1943), B-612, was discovered by a Turk. Of course, when he presented his discovery to the International Astronomical Congress the first time, in 1909, he was dressed as an Ottoman Turk, in a Fez and pointed shoes, and so was ignored by the scientific community. The second time he announced the discovery was after the fall of the Ottomans, the revolution of Kemal Attaturk, 1920, and so he wore western dress, a suit and tie, and his discovery was accordingly acknowledged. I think de Saint-Exupéry was trying to tell us something with this story.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @12:30PM
So if your hallucinations don't change regardless of much you try to deny them, that means they are not just hallucinations, but actual reality? Well, I guess a lot of patients have been lied to by their psychiatrists, then. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:24PM
> an Islamic hellhole
You paint with an impressively wide brush.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @04:06PM
Istanbul is such a wonderful city. Sad the leaders of Turkey are behaving like dictators, and that so many paranoid people seem to actively try to destroy it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jrial on Monday June 27 2016, @10:29AM
Sure, shaming them for not sending a large group of critical people to a dangerous place, despite one of them having been to another dangerous place in the recent past. Doesn't Len see the difference between putting one man in potential danger vs. putting a large number of key personnel in potential danger? Some companies put their staff on different flights to the exact same conference, exactly because of this sort of risk mitigation.
Reminds me of the olympics. As far as I'm aware, that's still happening, despite the serious health risks to all involved. Because "pride" and "patriotism" and other pretty words.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 27 2016, @12:11PM
And for what reason: a misguided assumption that Istanbul is more dangerous than Paris, or Brussels, or Orlando, Florida, or for that matter Israel and Jordan where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently visited.
You can tell he's lying because there's no numbers. You don't even have to google.
The problem with Turkey is they are oscillating in wilder and wilder swings of Islamic extremism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Turkey [wikipedia.org]
"In 2010 a 16-year-old Kurdish girl was buried alive by relatives for befriending boys in Southeast Turkey; her corpse was found 40 days after she went missing.[4] Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a Turkish-Kurdish physics student who represented his country at an international gay conference in the United States in 2008, was shot dead leaving a cafe in Istanbul."
Alternating with massive intense secular police crackdowns a la the Shah of Iran's last days.
This makes the propaganda hilarious in that some days, months, in the past even years, Istanbul is the safest place on the planet during massive crackdowns, or its pretty much the worst parts of Syria on the bad days, which are happening more often over time and seemingly inevitably the secular government is going to fall, soon.
So NASA employees required either on paper or morally to attend could each be surrounded by 15 cops acting like secret service agents, or maybe the oscillation will be the other way at that time and a gay employee could be shot or a female employee killed or raped. Nobody politically can care about white men except "evil whit nationalists" but they'll certainly get just as well killed over nothing if the fundie muslims happen to be rioting that day.
Its kind of like visiting the inner cities in the USA. During the day, if a politician visits and there's massive police presence or a tourist event, they're pretty safe. On the other hand they're kind of a living hell for the locals maybe 75% of the time. So is an inner USA city the safest place in the world or most deadly?
Its seems fairly inevitable Turkey will reach a boiling point. At some level the EU will finally say "enough" and toss out their applications, and they'll be a revolution and it'll be analogous to Khomeini's 1980s Iran for awhile. Things are not stabilizing in Turkey, they're amplifying and either things are going to change soon or things are going to completely blow up.
For folks who don't know anything about the middle east, the Turkey demographic situation is Iraq. Multiculturalism always fails, most spectacularly in the middle east.. A random scribbling by euros around WWI / WWII leads to a country with ethnic groups that despise each other (maybe on purpose to divide and conqueror...). About 3/4 of the country and their main government are trying to ethnically cleanse the 1/4 or so who are Kurds (no exaggeration, sadly). There's a sociological "thing" where under pressure islamic groups react by fundamentalize-ing and that side is violently trying to figure out if they go full on Iranian revolution religious mode or go Saddam Hussein secular dictator mode. The current dictator is a complete lunatic but compared to the religious nuts he's relatively sane and at the same time if he wasn't a bloodthirsty madman he would already be dead.
The near term future of Turkey is similar to Saddam, Khomeni, ethnic cleansing, or civil war and partition. Or wait to build up more pressure. Sadly there are no other alternatives for Turkey. The county is Fed and any chance of fixing it was long ago.
Turkey is just messed up and possibly the dumbest possible location for a meeting. It would be like scheduling a conference for Rwanda in the spring of 94.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Monday June 27 2016, @02:04PM
About 3/4 of the country and their main government are trying to ethnically cleanse the 1/4 or so who are Kurds (no exaggeration, sadly).
Too bad they couldn't just, y'know, let them have a little bit of land and make their own country like they've been trying to get since WWII. Isn't the territory we're talking about even the closest of Turkey's to ISIS? Two birds with one stone; let them take care of the threat themselves.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday June 27 2016, @02:40PM
Turkey has been extremely reluctant to arm/train the Kurds. Even though they really really should be.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 27 2016, @03:30PM
It goes back further like 900 years. The Kurds were chilling and then the turks invaded and set up their turk/ottoman empire with the kurds in between the turks and the persians. Generally the kurds allied with and beat the hell out of the other member of the threesome and politics being what it is, they ended up going back and forth uncountable times.
More recently the Kurds were a subplot of the Armenian genocide more or less within living memory. So as per historical issues, if you gave the Kurds in Turkey guns they'd surely ally with the Persians (Iran) or neighbors in general and primarily start shooting Turks. Frankly the leadership in Turkey deserves it (the rank and file citizens not so much)
So the Turks walk a tightrope of trying to punish and control the Kurds enough to prevent them from creating a Kurdistan and then fighting the Turks, vs being too heavy handed and causing an outright rebellion.
Meanwhile the Turks are not universally loved (LOL) so anyone who doesn't like the Turks gives the Kurds money and guns and subtly points them westward.
No one in that part of the world is much interested in peace. Gotta get even.
Its interesting to compare and contrast the Kurds as a dispossessed people with the Palestinians. It would be amusing as a social engineering experiment to force march the two groups to swap. The Palestinians could live in relative peace with the Turks based on history and the Kurds could live in relative peace with the Israelis. At least relative peace in comparison to their current neighbors. Just too much bad blood with their current neighbors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @12:04AM
Kurds have access to oil in the ground (in Iraq). The Palestinians don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @04:52PM
These were lone shooters or two-man operations. There was no support group sheltering the terrorists. So yes, I would say that Orlando FL is safer from terrorism compared to Istanbul or Brussels.