ISTANBUL (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan have agreed in an exchange of letters to resume talks aimed at mending ties, Turkey's top diplomat said on Friday (Jan 15). Erdogan wrote a New Year message to Macron expressing condolences for several attacks in France last year, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying by local media. Macron sent back a "very positive" letter this week, starting with the greeting "Dear Tayyip" and saying he was open to a meeting, Cavusoglu said. The French presidency confirmed the exchange of letters without providing details. "We now need tangible gestures" from Ankara, the French presidency said. Ankara and Paris last year sparred over a host of international issues, including the conflicts in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. The European Union is now drawing up an expanded list of Turkish individuals to sanction for Ankara's decision to drill for natural gas in eastern Mediterranean waters near Cyprus. The diplomatic tensions have been accompanied by a bitter personal feud between the two men. Erdogan last year accused Macron of "Islamaphobia", suggested he undergo mental health checks, and urged French
LONDON (AFP) - With schools closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, millions of children in Britain are struggling to learn remotely, because of a lack of computers, Internet or quiet room to study. "At home, I have to share the computer with my big brother and sister," said eight-year-old Kamaljit Sultana, who lives in Tower Hamlets in east London, one of the city's poorest boroughs. Without her class teacher to help her, "it's more difficult, I'm a bit lost!" she added. More than 93,000 people have died in Britain in the outbreak, and the country has been in a new lockdown since early this month, as a new variant of the virus has caused a worrying surge in cases. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is hoping to reopen schools by Easter in April, leaving families several more months to struggle with homeschooling. Mr James Turner, chief executive of educational charity the Sutton Trust, said the poorest children suffer the most. Some "either don't have any devices in their home or they're trying to learn online using a mobile phone", he told AFP. And where a phone is available, it is sometimes
The Democrats’ mission is not to defund the police. It is to devour the police. And who better than a Biden Department of Justice to do it? Once former Vice President Joe Biden was safely declared the winner of the 2020 election, Democrats took a fleeting respite from genuflecting to their young Marxist firebrands and surveyed the down-ballot wreckage. Suddenly, there was pooh-poohing of the notion that anyone actually wanted to defund the police. This news was announced by self-styled “centrist” Democrats, who’d seemed to have lost their voice on that subject while America’s cities burned, our businesses were looted, and our crime rates spiked — and while what passes for the “center” moved about thirty yards leftward on the party’s gridiron. Naturally, the outraged conservative press was quick to roll the tape. In fact, the AOC “Squad” and its vitriolic imitators, one after the next, were adamant: Not only were they quite serious about dismantling police departments, but they had already taken concrete steps in several cities to slash law-enforcement budgets. The prospect of gridlock on Capitol Hill intensifies Biden’s need to resort to executive action to appease his party’s increasingly hard-left base. That brings the nation’s
