World Press on Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus (January 26, 2010)

"Russia fails to come to grips with growing tide of racism", an article with such a headline says in The Guardian. The author begins the article with a story of Egana Gassanova, 45-year old resident of
Moscow, born in Azerbaijan. In the last two month she has been experiencing unbearable insults. According to the author the story is not a unique one. Hate crimes are widespread in Russia, 37 people were killed and 368 injured in 2010.

The New York Times has published an article headlined "It's Turkey's Move". The article is devoted to the conflict between the Turkish Chess Federation and the European Chess Union. The conflict is
worsened by the fight between the Ali Nihat Yazici, the president of the Turkish Chess Federation, and Sava Stoisavljevic, the general secretary of the ECU.

The Moscow Times published today an article by Russian journalist Yuliya Latynina. The article is headlined "Stop Sweeping Terror Under The Carpet". Mrs. Latynina says that Russia has been subjected to major terrorist attacks on a regular basis for the past 12 years. According to her, whenever it was impossible to deny terrorist involvement, the authorities didn't bother to investigate and tried to forget about the attacks as quickly as possible. "No doubt, the current tragedy at Domodedovo will also be swept under the carpet in the same way several days after leaders express their traditional, obligatory words of condolence, outrage and regret," Latynina says.

The St. Petersburg Times published today an article entitled "Bigger Bureaucracy Can Be Better". "With great fanfare, President Dmitry Medvedev has announced his intention to slash bureaucracy by 20
percent. It is a bold attempt to deal with an unmanageable government apparatus, perhaps the chief cause of the country's persistent economic problems", says the author, and then adds, "It is also
profoundly mistaken". According to the author, the push to shrink the Russian bureaucracy is founded on two myths. The first myth is that the bureaucracy is unusually large. The second is that larger
bureaucracies necessarily impede private economic activity. There is no empirical support for either proposition, thinks the author.

The Turkish news agency Hurriyet has published an article entitled "Islamic traditionalists, Islamic modernists". The author tells about a recently published article by Hayrettin Karaman, a retired professor of Islamic law, headlined "Secularization and Degeneration". According to Professor Karaman, Islamic modernists would have no problem in embracing liberal democracy, while he other camp would know that Islam and liberal democracy are "not fully compatible," for implementing
some of the rules of classical Islam is not possible in a secular state.

Another article published by Hurriyet is headlined "Cost-benefit analysis of Turkey's foreign policy". The author is trying to make a realistic analyses of the foreign policy of the country defined by
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as "zero problems with neighbors" policy. Among the benefits the author names visa liberation with some regional countries and certain moves made outside the Middle East that would contribute to Turkey's economy in the future. Among costs he names worsening of the Azerbaijani-Turkish relations, deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations, questioned position over Iran and worsening of the country's relations with the NATO and the USA. All things concluded author thinks that Davutoglu's policy is not successful.