Published time: July 08, 2013 16:41

Turkish police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse protesters who tried to defy a closure order and enter Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The park was the focal point of nationwide protests against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in June.

Istanbul’s Gezi Park, which has been the focus of several weeks of tensions in the country, was briefly opened to the public on Monday.

Athens Mayor George Kaminis has been attacked by local authority workers protesting against job cuts tied to Greece’s financial bailout.

Mayor Kaminis was “physically attacked” on Sunday by suspected union workers protesting job cuts, his office announced, according to AFP. The incident happened as the mayor was leaving a Confederation of Greek Municipalities (KEDE) meeting, where he held discussions about the austerity measures and the way they affect thousands of municipal employees.

According to reports, he was struck by unionists representing municipal workers outside the building.  Kaminis was checked in to hospital where he was treated for minor injuries.

After being discharged, Kaminis issued a statement blaming POE-OTA union and its leader, Themis Balasopoulos, for the assault.

“By targeting the mayor of Athens, who has spoken clearly on all issues, the POE-OTA president is trying to cover up his longstanding embroilment in the clientelistic system in local government,” the mayor’s office said, accusing Balasopoulos of leading union members “down a dangerous road”, local papers reported.

In turned POE-OTA condemned the attack blaming provocateurs for the incident, saying it was “damaging for the just fight of local authority workers”. 

KEDE has also spoken out against the assault. “The Board of KEDE strongly condemns the fascist and unacceptable attack against the Mayor,” the confederations said in a statement.

Municipal employees are scheduled to protest in Athens on Monday against the government’s decision to implement a labor mobility scheme which would mean either transferring employees to different departments or cancelling their contracts.

Some 25,000 civil servants must be transferred by the end of the year and another 4,000 made redundant to gain access to the Troika’s 8.1 billion euros bailout funds.

Eurozone finance ministers will meet Monday to discuss further authorization of funds conditional on Greece being on track with its reform process.

NYT: By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK.

CAIRO — A party of ultraconservative Islamists has emerged as an unexpected political kingmaker in Egypt, shaping the interim government after the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. The Al Nour party, widely regarded two years ago as bumbling amateurs, now has unique leverage. It was the only Islamist party to support removing Mr. Morsi, despite his ties to the more moderate Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the sight of Al Nour’s bearded sheik, standing behind the general who announced the takeover on television, was the only signal to Egyptian voters that the move had not been an attack on Islam, as some of the ousted president’s supporters are saying.

The party played a starring role in the military’s choreographed presentation of its takeover as the chance to reunify a country on the brink of civil war between opponents and supporters of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. But while Al Nour’s leaders say they intend to build bridges, some liberals say the party is pushing potentially divisive demands, from picking a new prime minister to keeping Islam prominent in any new constitution.

Over the weekend, Al Nour tested its leverage for the first time to force the retraction of an announced plan to name a liberal icon, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, as interim prime minister.

“You just can’t do something like that, after we had appeared right next to you on the scene” at the televised announcement, Younis Makhyoun, a Nour party leader, said on Sunday. “We have grass roots,” Mr. Makhyoun added, “and they don’t agree on the choice of ElBaradei.”

Instead, state news media outlets reported on Sunday that the interim government was close to naming as acting prime minister Ziad Bahaa el-Din, a former head of Egypt’s investment authority. A Nour leader blessed him in a radio interview as “one of the liberal figures that we greatly respect.”

The party’s ability to block Mr. ElBaradei from the premiership raised new alarms from liberals about what the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, might demand next, even after the expulsion of the more moderate Brotherhood.

“This stage of the revolution was against this type of Islamist party,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers of the anti-Morsi protests. “We will not have any concessions when it comes to writing the constitution, and we will die for that,” he added, vowing that the charter should include “a separation of religion and politics, because parties should not be built on religion.”

Other organizers of the protests that helped force Mr. Morsi from office said they would stage new demonstrations in part against Al Nour.

Many of the party’s old Islamist allies, meanwhile, are denouncing Al Nour’s leaders as traitors, if not apostates, for turning on Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood.

“They are being used to beautify or whitewash this military coup,” said Gehad el-Haddad, a Brotherhood spokesman. “They are making enemies on both sides.”

For the sheiks of Al Nour, though, the Brotherhood’s fall is also an extraordinary opening. “They have a chance to be the main Islamist player in politics in post-Morsi Egypt,” said Samer Shehata, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies Egypt’s Islamists.

“They see an opportunity to capitalize on the Brotherhood’s loss of support,” he said. “Who is left in formal politics under the banner of Islam now? It is the Nour party.”

The bedfellows could not be stranger. Since its inception two years ago, the Nour party has campaigned more than anything else for constitutional provisions enshrining Islamic law, not just “the principles of Islamic law,” as Egypt’s charter read for three decades. Al Nour and other Salafist parties sought to give religious scholars a constitutional power to strike down any legislation that they deemed contradictory to Islamic law. But in the drafting of the country’s new Constitution last year, the Muslim Brotherhood sided with the liberals to block such a provision. Al Nour succeeded in preventing an express guarantee of equality for women from being written into the new charter, and it has defended prohibitions of heresy.

Feminist activists in Azerbaijan have sent a blow-up doll to a government official who said that the proper place for women was either “in the grave or in the kitchen,” writes Magerram Zeynalov in the article published in IWPR site.

According to the publication comments made by transport ministry spokesman Namik Hasanov saying that “a woman’s place is only in the kitchen. Even in the 22nd century” provoked fury among women’s rights defenders across the country.

Hasanov’s comment was particularly ill-timed as it came just before International Women’s Day on March 8.

To formulate a response, a Facebook group was set up to discuss possible options. Members collected 200 manats, about 260 US dollars, to buy an inflatable sex toy abroad, since such things are not available in local shops.

The group waited until just before Armed Forces Day on June 26 – which they described as “Man’s Day”– to send the official their gift.
“In making his comment, Hasanov gave us women a present for the women’s holiday, so we tried to reply in kind,” said Ulviya Mamedova, one of the activists behind the plan. “We aren’t trying to offend anyone. We just want Namik Hasanov to respect women’s rights.”

While the sex toy was meant as a light-hearted stunt, campaigner say sexist stereotypes remain a serious problem in Azerbaijan. At a June 20 press conference, the campaigners publicised an open letter addressed to Hasanov.

“We’re sending you this technological innovation just in case you aren’t already aware of it. We hope our present will look good in your kitchen, or in a grave somewhere,” the letter said.

According to Mamedova, the letter “reminded Namik Hasanov of the international conventions to which Azerbaijan has signed up, and the obligations our country has assumed. We also remind him of the laws of the land, of which he may be unaware,” she said.

Interviewed later by RFE/RL, Hasanov said he never intended to cause offense, but then went on to dig himself deeper. “My comments about women were taken out of context. In actual fact, I just think women look best in the kitchen,” he said. “I don’t want a woman to destroy her family for the sake of her work or career. I’m not saying women shouldn’t work – it’s just that I think that if women spend a lot of time working, it will destroy their families,” he said.

Matanat Azizova, head of the Women’s Crisis Centre, said Hasanov’s comments were particularly worrying as they set the tone for other officials.

“When the journalists interviewed Namik, they were speaking to him as a representative of the state,” she said, describing his comments as “as a kind of instruction to all state employees on how they should treat women”.

According to the article, the casual denigration of women translates into systemic discrimination. In the Global Gender Gap survey for 2012, produced by the World Economic Forum Azerbaijan came in 99th out of 135 countries – below every other former Soviet state included on the listing.

Iranian state television says the country has opened its own domestically made national email service, AP reported.

The report aired Sunday quoted Information and Communication Technology Minister Mohammad Hasan Nami as saying local experts created the service’s software. The report said each Iranian will be assigned an email address.

The country’s postal service will manage the email service.

Iran has discussed for years having its own domestic email service as the government occasionally has blocked access to foreign email providers like Gmail and Yahoo. The country also has blocked and made illegal virtual private networks that allow Iranians to freely use the Internet and access banned websites like those for opposition groups.

Official statistics suggest Iran, home to 75 million people, has some 32 million Internet users

The pan-Armenian festival of dolma (stuffed rolls with rice, meat, and spices wrapped in vine or cabbage leaves) will for the first time be held in Sardarapat, July 10.

Sedrak Mamulyan, Chairman of the Development and Preservation of Armenian Cookery NGO, announced a surprise – the longest dolma will be shown at the festival.

“About 60 varieties of dolma were shown at last year’s festival. This year we are going to show the longest dolma. We even have an intention to get a record registered by the Guinness Book,” Mamulyan said.

The following nomination will feature the festival: the best taste, the best idea, the best amateur-cook, and spectators’ sympathies.
Cooks from Lori, Tavush, Gegharkuni and Armavir will take part in the festival. The funds to be raised will be provided to an Armavir school.

The organizers decided to make the festival overlap with the Golden Apricot film festival.

Vardan Hakobyan, a representative of the Golden Apricot festival, said that the aim is to place emphasis on such events.