Government officials had earlier ruled out terrorism or sabotage and given various possible causes including a spark from a

Government officials had earlier ruled out terrorism or sabotage and given various possible causes, including a spark from a welder’s torch or an electrical short-circuit. Thick smoke from yesterday’s blaze forced one runway closure, and about 2,000 workers had to flee the flames.
The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons Organisation, a hardline group linked to the main Kurdistan Workers’ Party guerrilla group, said it started the fire to protest against Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish minority. Batman has no shelter or helpline, with the nearest being run by a women’s group called Kamer, which is based in the neighbouring province of Diyarbakir.. A Kurdish separatist group claimed responsibility for a large fire at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport that injured three people, delayed international flights and destroyed the main cargo-handling building The group’s claim could not be independently verified.

The tensions between Islamists, who have a large constituency in rural areas, and the secularists who dominate the army and legal professions, are keenly felt in this part of the country.Campaigners have pointed to the absence of support for women at risk of abuse. Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey’s leading novelists, set his latest work Snow in Batman with the protagonist being a journalist investigating a suicide epidemic among teenage girls.The city has found itself at the nexus of the contradictory pressures facing the overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey. Turkey is in danger of following the path of Pakistan, Ms Pervizat added, where intense media interest in honour killings was making male-dominated communities find other ways to punish or control women.”They’re going to kill women one way or another,” she said.The mystery of female suicides in Batman has fascinated public opinion in the country for several years. Leyla Pervizat, a women’s rights researcher in Istanbul, warned against blaming a change in the law for the unexplained deaths and cautioned the media against looking for easy answers.”I’m not surprised this is happening,” she said. “At this stage I’ve got more questions than answers.”Other observers have blamed the suicides on despair among young women forced to live severely restricted lives. “This trend is the reverse of what we’ve found in the rest of the world and is a great concern,” said Ms Erturk. Legal changes that affected women included an end to commuting sentences for so-called honour killings, while convicted rapists can no longer avoid prison sentences by marrying their victims.Violence against women is a fact in every country – in the UK two women a week are killed by their partners – but in Turkey conservative attitudes lag behind recent legislation.While Turkey has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, some areas of the country are registering higher numbers of women than men taking their lives.

This figure is already much higher than the number for the whole of last year.
Many of the women who have died were allegedly the victims of “forced suicides”, where husbands or relatives pushed them into killing themselves to cleanse a perceived offence against family honour.The family remains paramount across Turkish society and adultery or sex before marriage can be seen as crimes by more socially conservative elements.The practice of honour killings in Turkey has received widespread attention, and some observers fear that changes to the penal code passed last year have had the unintended consequence of channelling domestic violence into less direct forms.Women’s groups have claimed that in some instances women have been locked in a room with a knife and a gun and told by relatives to end their lives.Ms Erturk expressed her horror at the reported number of deaths but said there was no hard evidence to support speculation concerning forced suicides.The increasing influence of women’s groups and the prospect of European Union membership prompted a major overhaul of Turkish law in 2005. Yakin Erturk, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, travelled yesterday to the eastern Turkish city of Batman to follow up on reports in local media that up to 36 women had killed themselves since the start of the year. A United Nations envoy has arrived in Turkey to investigate a reported surge in the number of young women committing suicide. I predicted that the older Californians would struggle to hold their own against the French wines with a record of ageing gracefully. Last night proved the opposite to be the case ­ an absolutely fascinating and totally unexpected result Bordeaux will go ballistic Anthony Rose, The Independent’s wine critic. The boycott attempt shows their belief that they had everything to lose and nothing to gain Perhaps they guessed something that we didn’t. When told of the plan, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild of Mouton Rothschild refused to supply her wines or allow her cousin, Jacob Rothschild, to stage the event at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, as originally envisaged.

Although Mr Spurrier’s idea in holding a re-run was to have a bit of fun, “Son of Judgement of Paris” has not gone down well there. New World fine wines have arrived and regularly trounce French counterparts in blind tastings The bitter memory still lingers in Bordeaux. The fact that a California cabernet and chardonnay were judged superior to the cr? de le cr? of Bordeaux and Burgundy was more than a blow to Gallic amour-propre. At a stroke, it shattered the myth of the superiority of French terroir and handed California, and the New World with it, the confidence to believe it could beat Les Bleus And it has. What happens may bear a passing resemblance to the 1976 event, but it doesn’t come close to the extraordinary impact of the original. When the 1976 tasting was first mooted, none of the nine French judges, nor even Steven Spurrier, the wine critic behind it, considered the possibility of anything other than glorious victoire for the French.

Both of the original champions ­ a 1973 chardonnay from Ch?au Montelena and the 1973 cabernet sauvignon from Stags’ Leap Wine Cellars ­ are on display at the Smithsonian. Upstarts from New World savour glorious victoire Imagine real Abba fans going to a Bjorn Again concert and you will get an impression of how participants contemplated this 30th anniversary ” Judgement of Paris” tasting. For the straggling French, then, it is a call back to the vines For the winner, immortality beckons. Not only did it convince people that something good was coming out of California but it was a much-needed wake-up call for the French.” Another of the judges, Jasper Morris, agreed that the 1976 result ” helped weed out slack practices in France”. “Until then growers had been having terrible trouble convincing leading restaurants even in Washington or New York to serve Californian wine But two days later everything changed It was a bloody good thing.