BEYOND THE BOSPORUS: Imamoglu, jailed challenger to Erdogan, given 3 minutes per criminal charge to defend himself

Imamoglu in court. The jailed politician also indicated astonishment at the world leaders who last week visited Ankara for a NATO summit, but said nothing about the Erdogan regime's crushing of Turkey's opposition. / social mediaFacebook

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By Akin Nazli in Belgrade July 15, 2026

Elected mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition politician jailed before he could step up his campaign to end the grip of Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Turkey’s presidency, on July 13 launched a blistering attack on the country’s judiciary from his prison cell.

From Silivri prison, Imamoglu warned that Turkey faces a "multifaceted judicial collapse" that will silence political dissent ahead of future elections.

In an AI-generated video message targeted at young voters, Imamoglu – who would be widely expected to defeat Turkish leader of 23 years Erdogan in a head-to-head contest – explained the tight constraints he faces in his ongoing trial over supposed extensive corruption in his Istanbul municipal administration. The court, he said, has severely restricted his ability to defend himself against a mountain of state accusations.

Three minutes per charge

Imamoglu revealed how the court has allocated a single session of seven to eight hours for his entire defence. The time must be divided up between himself, three defence lawyers and cross-examinations conducted by judges, prosecutors and co-defendants.

"They tell me, 'make your defence'. They expect a defence in this timeframe against 143 criminal charges and a 4,000-page pile of nonsense," said Imamoglu.

"Under this schedule, I am being given barely three minutes to defend myself against each charge levelled against me. They make it so hopeless, the prosecution has no questions to ask me and neither does the court panel. Their only required path is to prevent a defence so that no one hears Ekrem."

Case “architect” Erdogan is “afraid”

The massive trial has become a flashpoint in Turkish politics. The first hearing commenced in March, as the court moved to deal with more than 400 defendants. After three months, the court insisted that it would end the first hearing on July 9, even as Imamoglu, accused of being the leader of a gang of organised criminals, awaited his moment as the last defendant to present his defence.

Remarked Imamoglu: “Erdogan, who is afraid of both live broadcasts and his [political] rival, and is the architect of all these [prosecution] files, has gone down in history as the perpetrator of the pinnacle of this lawlessness organised by the justice minister [Akin Gurlek], who is a candidate to be his successor, and as the perpetrator of the legal ‘murder’ committed in every judicial process.”

Judicial collapse threatens all

He added: “Turkey is facing a many-sided threat of judicial collapse. The threat does not discriminate, it is a threat to businessmen, artists, journalists, dissidents, students, politicians, mayors and presidential candidates.

“Practices that disregard everyone's rights and freedoms loom over our nation. The justice ministry has been turned into a 'ministry of collapse'. With phrases like 'the bigger radish is still in the saddlebag' [a Turkish proverb somewhat equivalent to “The worst is yet to come”—Ed.] or 'the arms of the octopus', I don't know for the how-many-eth time but I think there is deceit with Erdogan once again."

Jarring silence of world leaders who came and went

Imamoglu – speaking in the week that brought the 10th anniversary of the failed coup attempt that foreshadowed Erdogan’s huge crackdown on opponents in all fields up and down the country – concluded: “While Turkey was experiencing this judicial disgrace, world leaders [attending the Nato leaders’ summit in Ankara] came and went.

“What was the result? [Donald] Trump said: 'I can't say Erdogan is friends with [Benjamin] Netanyahu, but he left Israel alone, he is a wonderful ally. They [Turkey] have the largest land forces [in Nato apart from those of the US] ready to fight'.”

Antifa Conspiracy Hogwash: A Convenient Platform for Fascism

Eve Ottenberg

 July 15, 2026

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Let’s start with reality: there is no Antifa organization. There exists no Antifa “funding” that FBI director Kash Patel claims he is hunting down – he’ll be doing that from now till Kingdom Come, because it quite simply doesn’t exist. There is no shadowy Antifa conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and what Donald “Nail a Commie” Trump regards as its God-given mission to promote capitalism. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fascist chimera, a demagogic delusion, a convenient hallucination, a mad mirage, a demented nightmare for the boobocracy. It’s bullshit.

What there is, is people fed up with ICE. It is people, quite a few Americans in fact, who hate fascism. They are – surprise! – anti-fascist. Whoever the idiot was who cooked up the supposedly brilliant idea of making all anti-fascists targets for right-wing cuckoo-birds by tagging them with the trendy abbreviation “Antifa,” I wish he – or she – had stayed home and kept his mouth shut. Because now morons in Washington believe – or maybe some just cynically exploit – the notion that there’s a national octopus of “Antifa” revolutionaries, who, like the devious anarchists of yore, can be eliminated via domestic counter-terrorism.

So we have a problem. Government orgs like the FBI, with fascist roots reaching back over a century, are now, under Trump, laser focused on the very saleable “Antifa” conspiracy. Along the way lots of innocent anti-fascists have their lives turned upside down. Just witness the recent sentencing of the anti-ICE Prairieland protesters. According to the Intercept June 23, one so-called Antifa protestor, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was “convicted of obstructing the investigation by moving a box full of antifascist zines after the protest.” The lunatic judge threw the book at him and sentenced him to 30 years, one of eight absurdly, shockingly lengthy sentences “handed down by judges in two courtrooms in Forth Worth,” a case “widely regarded as the Trump administration’s first major victory in its crackdown on left-wing activism.” Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, got 70 years, because she allegedly asked her husband “to move the zines after her arrest.”

Patel delivered a colossally stupid statement after these harsh sentences – one of which was for 100 years – saying these punishments “show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country.” Antifa has no funding networks, because it is not an organization. It is a label. And an unfortunate, troublesome, imbecilic one, at that.

So how did these eight protestors wind up with such wildly wrong sentences? They all wore black to the protest! So that’s one fashion statement you don’t want to make if you’re demonstrating against ICE. Prosecutors in this case told the jury that, per the Intercept March 12, “wearing all black at protests makes you guilty of terrorism.” What if you’re returning home from a funeral and wander into an anti-ICE-Gestapo demo? Welp, too bad for you. You’re guilty of terrorism. Also, the luckless defendants “used the Signal encrypted messaging app.” So do journalists I know of; they might want to ditch Signal tout de suite. Signal, in turn, might want to sue these prosecutors for defamation that harms its business.

In other words, the prosecution was reaching, straining to expand its weak, lousy case from “we don’t like their look and their tech” to “terrorism!” And the astounding fact is – they succeeded, not just with the jurors but with two half-wit judges. And beyond their wildest dreams; which raises the question, why? The answer, as I’ve been none too subtly suggesting, lies not just in the run-of-the-mill, bovine stupefaction of a complacently ignorant mass of Amuricans, but in the creation by the media, and the birdbrains who coined the term “Antifa,” of an “Antifa” bogeyman. The fact that using this bogeyman nets a bunch of anti-fascists is an added plus for our FBI maniacs, suspicious of Signal and those wearing black.  But my guess is anyone who calls themselves Antifa, even if no anti-fascist, would be acceptable quarry for Trump security state predators.

The Department of Justice is bursting with pride at what it has done. Its press release dated June 23 is headlined: “Leader of Antifa Cell Members in North Texas Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility.” The press release trumpets the defendants being “affiliated with Antifa.” These eight defendants all together got a combined sentence of 450 years in prison, following their 12-day trial that started February 23. One defendant “was granted a continuance and will be sentenced on July 1. Seven others…pleaded guilty prior to trial to one count of providing material support to terrorists and they will be sentenced on July 1.”

Then the DOJ finally spikes the heart of the matter: “The defendants were members of a North Texas Antifa Cell, part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups…[who call for] the overthrow of the United States Government.” The press release repeatedly invokes this insane notion of an Antifa cell and a larger coordinated Antifa organization. But just saying something doesn’t make it so. The Trump cult can scream about a unified Antifa conspiracy all it likes, no matter: Where’s the proof Antifa is anything other than an updated, hipper locution for something that, without a nickname, might be too complicated for your average reactionary nincompoop to grasp, namely anti-fascism? As far as anyone can tell, Antifa is little more than the occasional anti-fascist punching a goth Nazi in the nose in his local bar. But unfortunately, this happened enough absolutely to enrage the far right, so that it claims a concerted Antifa org is out to undermine Amurica.

“Evidence at trial revealed that most of the ANTIFA cell involved in the Prairieland attack looked to Benjamin Song as a leader,” the DOJ hyperventilates. And Song owned guns! Ordinarily for reactionaries, gun ownership is a sacred Amurican right, worth the bloody, regular ritual slaughter of schoolchildren by psychotics with semi-automatic weapons being excused by the far right as the price we pay for our freedoms. I suppose for them sometimes the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of toddlers. In short, it depends, I guess, who owns the guns. If the owner protests ICE abuses, then his gun ownership proves he belongs to a nefarious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. DOJ also breathlessly invokes “ideologically aligned groups,” namely those luckless women who “created and distributed insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’” Short for magazines and pamphlets. Like Antifa is short for anti-fascist. How many multi-decade prison sentences will it take before leftist bubbleheads abandon this idiotically provocative lingo?

Calling things by their names is far more likely actually to stump boneheaded reactionaries. Attacking an anti-fascist means what? That you’re attacking someone opposed to fascism? Well, such an attack is prima facie, even for rightists, a bad thing. Fascists were once Amurica’s enemies. We even fought a war against them. But if you’re attacking Antifa? Ah, now that’s another kettle of insurrectionists. It’s an amorphous term, whose provenance is obscured, and which can be slapped onto just about anything a far-right nitwit doesn’t like. You’re even supposed to pronounce it with the stress on the second syllable, making its relation to “anti-fascist” even more opaque. Cool. That makes it almost impossible to link, orally, to antifascist. Antifa is a dream-come-true for dimwit reactionaries and their judges, who think pounding its so-called followers with 100-year sentences strikes a blow against a vast, coordinated underground network of revolutionaries. Who’s gonna tell these judicial chumps? None of this stuff exists. There are just anti-fascists, who recognize that what ICE does is, well, unvarnished fascism. For that – and for moving a box of magazines – they get 70 years behind bars.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.

BAN DEEP SEA MINING

Arctic seabed mission documents fragile marine life threatened by Norway's deep-sea mining plans

By Denis Loktev

Published on 13/07/2026 - EURONEWS

A month-long Arctic expedition has revealed deep-sea ecosystems in an area being considered for mining.

For a month, a team of international scientists explored the Arctic seabed off the coast of Norway. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) roamed the ocean's seamounts and hydrothermal vents, plunging as deep as 3,000 metres.

Their mission? To gather evidence on the rare and fragile marine life that could be threatened by plans to mine the seabed for critical minerals.

The expedition, run by Greenpeace, was livestreamed, drawing more than 450,000 viewers on social media platforms.

Scientists at the ROV control room Greenpeace

Among the species filmed was a rare Dumbo octopus – coincidentally, the mascot of the expedition. Researchers also gathered more than 400 sponge samples and identified several species that may be new to science.

Anne Helene Tandberg, a researcher at the University in Bergen who took part in the expedition, says deep-sea ecosystems are particularly slow to recover from disturbances. "Very many of the species are long-lived and don't produce very many offspring, so if something happens, they have very little [capacity for] restitution," she says.

The deep sea, even though it's far away from us, is already suffering a lot of problems.

 Anne Helene Tandberg 

University in Bergen

Tandberg adds that climate change is compounding the problem. Many deep-sea invertebrates rely on cold, stable water and external skeletons built from calcium, both of which are affected as oceans warm and acidify. "The deep sea, even though it's far away from us, is already now suffering a lot of problems," she says.

Relate

An ROV arm holding a "Listen to the science" poster at the Arctic seabed Greenpeace

Seabed mining plans face fierce debate

The area surveyed during the expedition was opened up for deep-sea mining by the Norwegian government in 2024. Exploration has since been paused until at least 2029, following objections from environmental groups, scientists, fishing communities and opposition parties in Norway.

Supporters of deep-sea mining, including some governments and mining companies, argue that the seabed holds reserves of critical minerals – such as cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements – needed for batteries, electric vehicles and other green technologies, and that these reserves could ease pressure on land-based supply chains. Norway has cited this rationale in pursuing its own domestic seabed resources.

Critics, including marine scientists and conservation groups, counter that the environmental risks are poorly understood and potentially irreversible, and that sufficient mineral reserves still exist on land. There are calls for a moratorium until the impacts are better known. Negotiations over international mining rules, led by the UN's International Seabed Authority, are still ongoing.

For the scientists behind the Arctic expedition, the priority is to gather evidence before any decision is made. Their samples and footage will be analysed in the coming months, with findings expected to feed into proposals for marine protected areas in Norwegian waters.

Number of jailed main opposition mayors in Turkey reaches 31

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, installed as current CHP leader by court order (though sceptics are wont to say "by the palace") backs the judicial operations targeting his party’s mayors. He vows "purification" from corruption. This heavily photoshopped photo appeared on the official party website. / chp.org.trFacebook

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By Akin Nazli in Belgrade June 26, 2026

The number of jailed main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayors in Turkey reached 31 as of June 25, according to data put together by Intellinews.

Official statistics covering the wide-scope operations are not available. (See statistics and lists compiled by this publication here).

The CHP itself does not provide statistics on the operations. It is questionable as to whether the party’s management is even aware of the latest numbers.

“Since 2025, around 20 CHP mayors and hundreds of municipal officials have been imprisoned,” Ozgur Ozel, the CHP leader who in May was by court order replaced with predecessor Kemal Kilicdaroglu, wrote on June 1 in an op-ed for Newsweek.

It is not feasible to track all developments as regards the operation mounted against the CHP since there are dozens of separate prosecutions and ongoing trials. Each day, more CHP members are detained, arrested, released or put on trial.

Real target Imamoglu

It was in October 2024 that the judicial operation targeted at the CHP began with the arrest of Esenyurt mayor Ahmet Ozer, who was accused of terrorism. In November 2025, he was released.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the deposed mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, has been in jail since March 19, 2025. He is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief political rival and a politician widely seen as having what it takes to topple Erdogan should he be at liberty to run for office.

As part of the move against the CHP, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has taken over 27 municipalities that were held by the party.

When former Istanbul chief public prosecutor Akin Gurlek, who launched the CHP operation, was promoted to justice minister in February, the assault on the coherence of the opposition party was boosted.

Criminal case hearings, in which state prosecutors allege that Imamoglu is the leader of an “octopus-like” gang or organised criminals, are taking place at Istanbul's Silivri Prison.

On March 9, the first Imamoglu trial hearing was held. Court officials wrote in the trial papers that the target is to complete the trial within 4,600 days (13 years).

Ankara mayor Mansur Yavas, another CHP member, is, like Ozel, not in jail, though he is a subject of many investigations. Observers say he remains free of prison because he keeps a distance from any moves aimed at launching a presidential candidacy.

‘The public isn’t against net zero. They’re waiting for it to pay them back’

Alistair Strathern MP  24th June, 2026

©tinhkhuong / Shutterstock.com

In July, events in the Middle East will push the typical family’s energy bill to £1,862, a 13% rise. Despite important steps the government has taken to target help to those who need it most, the experience for many around the country is that bills remain higher than before the energy crisis began and, for all the welcome recent talk in Westminster about wholesale prices and price caps, too many families around the country are losing faith in any politicians ability to fix it. 

I spent my years before Parliament at the Bank of England working on climate risk. So I have little patience for the argument, now fashionable on the right, that the way to cut bills is to walk away from the transition – it isn’t. We heat our homes and set our electricity price with imported gas, and every household pays for that exposure. The route out of volatility runs through clean, home-grown power, not around it. 

But I want to be honest with my own side too, and new polling, released today shows that we need to double down on making the energy transition pay. 

Polling from Startup Coalition and Public First found there is no anti-net-zero public in Britain. Instead, there is a public that has lost patience with a transition that asks them to pay without paying them back. Support for the 2050 target swings by up to 66 points depending on how you frame it: it collapses by 39 points when it’s pitched as an unspecified cost to taxpayers, and surges by more than 20 when it’s about lower bills, British jobs and energy independence. The biggest movement comes from exactly the voters we’re told are lost to us, older voters, Reform-leaning voters, when the offer is about them. 

56% of Brits feel the whole energy debate is about things outside their control and not about anything they can actually do. Trust in the Government to make bills affordable is split right down the middle. People feel locked out. 

This Government’s instincts on energy are correct. I was proud to vote for Great British Energy and for getting Britain building again. The clean-power mission is the right one. But it has so far been a story about the system; about the grid, renewable auctions, and planning reform. It is largely invisible from the kitchen table. And the part people can see and feel is the part that’s lagging. 

This gap, and the pace of change in an often overlooked technology crucial to the clean transition, gives us a huge opportunity to go further.

We must give power to the people, and help them kit up to make their homes part of the energy transition. The appetite here is enormous and almost entirely unmet: 82% say they’d take up new energy technology if they could sell surplus power back to the grid. A third would install plug-in solar (the panel-on-a-balcony kit that made over a million German homes their own little power stations). Two-thirds would buy the tech if it were sold in the middle aisle of Lidl. 

What’s standing in the way isn’t engineering or appetite, but unfinished policy. We’ve opened a consultation to legalise plug-in solar, which is genuinely welcome, but currently it explicitly leaves out the battery, which otherwise would help deliver a step change in savings. That’s why we need to finish the job by speeding up the finishing touches on plug-in solar and then cracking on with batteries as soon as possible. 

Just this week Octopus Energy announced they’re planning to get batteries to households across the country. Fuse Energy is also planning to double down on this tech. ESME energy have been helping households in my own constituency save through battery installation. These are British scale-ups delivering the transition to the masses – we should be helping them to reach as many as possible, as fast as we can. 

I came into politics because I believe the climate transition can be the great fairness project of our time, but only if working people are its beneficiaries, not its bill-payers. The public are ahead of Westminster on this. They’re not asking us to abandon net zero. They’re asking to feel it in their pockets, soon. Reform offers them nothing but nostalgia and higher bills. We can offer them power – over their own energy and their own money.

Alistair Strathern MP

Alistair Strathern is the Labour MP for Hitchin.@alistrathern

View all articles by Alistair Strathern MP

 

The methodology of wickedness: Data reveals the most evil Disney villain

Copyright Walt Disney - Canva

By David Mouriquand

Published on 19/06/2026 - EURONEWS

The House of Mouse has given audiences some cracking scoundrels over the years. Some heinous, some nightmarish, and some deeply misunderstood. And one is especially irredeemable...

“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.”

Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t wrong when he offered these words of wisdom.

Heroes are great and all that, but a great antagonist makes a film.

From Hannibal Lecter to Lots-o-Huggin' Bear, via Anton Chigurh and the Joker, it’s plain to see that devious bastards are the ones that stand out.

Disney is no different in this respect. Beyond loveable protagonists and, let’s face facts, very creepy princes who need to learn that an erection is not consent, the House of Mouse has given audiences some cracking scoundrels. Some heinous. Some nightmarish. Some deeply misunderstood.

But which Disney villain is the most evil?

Everyone has their favourites in this respect – with the Euronews Culture team split between the devious Jafar in Aladdin and the business-savvy octopus queen of sass that is Ursula in The Little Mermaid.

However, the good folks at PixlParade have taken it upon themselves to take a data-driven approach to the question.

They have compiled a list of the most popular Disney villains, included some deep cuts, and stressed that their focus is on original Disney antagonists. So no Star Wars or Marvel characters.

The team then established point values to the crimes, violations and prejudices the characters are guilty of. For example, mass murder gets you 50 points; child abuse / cruelty adds 15 points to the rap sheet; and arson will cost an extra 8 points... The points were totalled to produce a final score and a ranking of the 50 most evil antagonists.

You can check out the full villain scoring rubric point values and their sub-divisions here.

The number one villain may surprise you...

Before we get to the top spot, we can tell you that Cruella de Vil ranks surprisingly low considering her crimes against animals (35th spot). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ Evil Queen is also quite low (33), despite attempted murder, abuse of power and assault. As for Master Control Program in 1982’s Tron, it comes in at 19 with charges including attempted genocide / mass murder, psychological abuse, and theft.

Trust AI, they said... It'll be fine, they said...

Related

• Disney princesses: Study reveals the hidden health risks behind a happily ever after
• Why has Disney’s ‘Snow White’ remake been banned in Lebanon?

Now to the Top 10.

Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent comes in at 10 with a total of 241 points; the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise’s Captain Hector Barbossa and Captain Salazar are at 9 and 8 respectively (242 / 253); The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Oogie Boogie is in 7 with 271 points; Scar from The Lion King just misses the Top 5 with an already impressive 284 tally; Mulan’s Shan Yu makes n°5 (313); Gravity Falls’ Bill Cipher is a surprisingly high entry at 4 (375); the Horned King from the lesser-known 1985 film The Black Cauldron steals the bronze with three extra points and a total of 378; and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s Jadis the White Witch nabs the silver with 418 points...

Drumroll, please.

According to the analysis, the worst, most irredeemable, most evil Disney villain is... Judge Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Judge Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame Walt Disney

The religious fanatic and extreme xenophobe led a crusade of “moral cleansing” and earned the highest score of 425 among the Disney villains.

He is guilty of... Deep breath... Murder, genocide / mass murder, attempted genocide / mass murder, attempted child murder, attempted murder, assisting / ordering / conspiring murder, attempted domination, mass indoctrination / enslavement, attempted forced marriage, war crimes, child abuse / cruelty, terrorism, torture, tyranny, abuse of power, unlawful imprisonment, exploitation, kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, psychological abuse, psychological torture, stalking, animal cruelty, assault, hate crimes, mass arson, vandalism, mass property / environmental damage, deception / cheating / fraud, slander, treason / betrayal, harassment, sexual harassment, aaaaaaaaaaand conspiracy.

How does he find the time?? And good luck to any lawyer representing him. Not even Atticus Finch could get him off - especially when you recall his teaching methods with Quasimodo during that alphabet recital scene.

A is for Abomination. B is for Blasphemy. C is for Contrition. D is for Damnation. E is for Eternal damnation...

What do you think? Is Judge Frollo worthy of most evil Disney villain, or was another cheated of the top spot?

Just don't say Captain Hook. If ever there was a misunderstood "villain", it's the Captain of the Jolly Roger. How would you feel if some arrogant flying twink who kidnaps children chopped off your hand and fed the limb to a crocodile??

#JusticeForCap.