Predicting Putin's next move

As world leaders gather in Paris this week to discuss climate change, many were wondering if a possible meeting between the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would take place.

According to Putin's spokesman it will not.

After the downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last week in southern Turkey, relations between Moscow and Ankara have been tense. According to the Kremlin, Erdogan must first apologise before Putin will meet him. 

Right now Russia and Turkey are engaged in a war of words. 

Putin says that Russia was "stabbed in the back" by Turkey when it shot down the warplane. Russia has since placed visa restrictions and limited economic sanctions on Turkey. Moscow has also demanded an apology, but Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, said that his government would not "apologise on an occasion when we are right".

Even so, Erdogan has said that he was "saddened" by the event but suggested that Moscow would be "playing with fire" if it retaliates on Turkish nationals living and working in Russia.

Complex relations

The West might view recent events between Russia and Turkey as a new phenomenon, but this fails to take into account the complex and fraught relationship between the countries.

The downing of the Russian jet is simply the latest drama in a saga that has been playing out since the middle of the 16th century. 

In one form or another, Russia has driven Turkish foreign and defence policy for centuries. Since 1568, Turkey and Russia have been to war 12 times. At least nine of the occasions have been over Crimea - which Russia illegally annexed last year.

Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire have contested regions in the Black Sea, the South Caucasus and the Balkans for centuries.

In one form or another, Russia has driven Turkish foreign and defence policy for centuries. Since 1568, Turkey and Russia have been to war 12 times.

In 1772, Russian troops raided and briefly occupied Ottoman territory in the Levant. Even during World War I, Russian troops got within 160 kilometres of Ottoman-controlled Baghdad. The ensuing friction led to much bloodshed.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan [AP]

After World War II, Joseph Stalin's designs on Turkey's Eastern Anatolia Region and Soviet Russia's wish to control the Turkish Straits were what originally drove Turkey into NATO's arms.

Continue backing Turkey

Although NATO members have been steadfast in their support for Turkey's actions in shooting down the Russian plane, there is no telling how long this support will last. 

Turkey has long been considered a troublesome ally inside NATO. As countries such as France start calling for a broader coalition to confront the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that includes Russia, Turkey runs the risk of being left out to dry. 

This would be a shame. 

Turkey has been securing NATO's southern flank for decades. It also has the second largest military in NATO after the United States and it has been willing to use it.

During the Korean war, Turkey sent 15,000 troops as part of the United Nations Command, of whom about 20 percent were killed, wounded, or captured. It has participated in NATO-led peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. Since 2001, Turkey has  twice commanded the NATO mission in Afghanistan and has deployed thousands of troops there.

While Turkey can be a bothersome ally at times, especially under Erdogan's leadership, it is, on balance, an important member of the Alliance. 

NATO's leaders would be short-sighted if they marginalised Turkey for perceived closer cooperation with Russia in the fight against ISIL.

Even if the Kremlin changed course and Erdogan and Putin met in Paris this week, it would not change the animosity that now exists between the two leaders.

Russia's revenge

Erdogan can hold a grudge - as seen with his relationship with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. That   went in just a few short years from the two families holidaying together to Assad becoming enemy No 1.

For Putin, a leader always thinking strategically and a few moves ahead of his opponents, the downing of a Russian jet presents an opportunity to act aggressively and expand Russian influence elsewhere.

Last week Moscow bullied the wrong kid in the playground, writes Coffey [REUTERS]

Russia will seek revenge - and no brief encounter in Paris between Putin and Erdogan is going to change this.  But Putin might seek his revenge elsewhere. 

He could focus on the Baltic States, with Moscow taking another 500 metres of territory in Georgia. Putin could encourage pro-Russian separatists to breakaway in Moldova's ethnic Turkic region of Gagauzia. 

Or the Kremlin could back rebels in the Donbas region to bring about a breakdown of the Minsk II ceasefire agreement in Ukraine. In one way or another, all of these could cause problems for NATO and the West.

Russia regularly illegally probes the airspace of other NATO members, especially the Baltic States and the United Kingdom. 

But last week Moscow bullied the wrong kid in the playground and Lieutenant t Colonel Oleg Peshkov, a father of two, needlessly lost his life. If Russia would have only stayed outside Turkish air space this would have never happened.

No meeting in Paris could have changed this fact.

Luke Coffey is a research fellow specialising in transatlantic and Eurasian security at a Washington DC-based think-tank. He previously served as a special adviser to the British defence secretary and was a commissioned officer in the United States Army.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

How Airlines Are Using Social Media for Seat Selection

One of the greatest air travel anxieties is which random stranger will be seated next to you—especially when stress levels are already high for Thanksgiving travel. Will your next door neighbor be a loud snorer? Will they try to make conversation when you’d rather just take a nap?

Or are you the type that doesn’t mind striking up a dialogue at 30,000 feet? If so, the new trend of “social seating” might be for you. Airlines are increasingly allowing passengers who opt-in to share their social media profiles and use others’ to pick their seatmates. 

Climate change a low priority for most Canadians: Ipsos poll

As the Liberal government goes to negotiate a new climate agreement in Paris, polling shows that climate change is a low priority for most Canadians.

When presented with a long list of policy issues, only 13 per cent of Canadians chose climate change as one of their top three worries, according to an Ipsos poll provided exclusively to Global News. Forty per cent of Canadians chose health care, and 39 per cent chose unemployment. Climate change even ranked below crime and education.

“There are important issues and there are urgent issues,” said Mike Colledge, president of Canadian public affairs at Ipsos. While climate change is important, he said, day-to-day worries like a neighbour losing a job, or a parent in need of health services are almost always of greater concern.

However, according to the polling, he said, Canadians are open to action on climate change in a way that they haven’t been in a while. The Liberal government has “a great opportunity to lead, to have a conversation with Canadians.”

This is because 48 per cent of Canadians who have an opinion on the issue believe that the Liberal government should do more than the 30 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases proposed by the Conservatives. Nearly half of Canadians also believe that the government can address climate change and strengthen the economy at the same time. Slightly fewer people believe that climate change action will hurt the economy than those who believe it won’t.

“There’s a big honeymoon period here,” said Colledge. “Federal and provincial governments have done a good job in saying that we lag behind other countries.”

Politicians have said that we can do more, and Canadians are listening, he said. “And they’re listening on we can do this and grow the economy at the same time.”

Two years from now, if the economy hasn’t improved, the mood could shift, he thinks. So, it’s a good idea for the government to tackle it at the beginning of its mandate rather than closer to an election.

Global concern

Climate change is a global issue that requires global action. However, people in many other countries place climate change even lower than Canadians do.

In developing countries, said Colledge, “it’s really not an issue.”

“Some of the poorer countries, corruption and crime are higher up on their lists,” he said. With the exception of China – where air pollution is highly visible in cities – generally only developed countries rank it as a top concern.

Mass panic as Kenyan university stages 'terror' drill

A number of students from Strathmore were injured on Monday when they attempted to flee from the university [Twitter/@Mate_Tongola]

A security drill at a Nairobi university has caused mass panic among staff and students after security forces used what many thought was live ammunition to stage a pretend attack on the school.

Social media went into overdrive on Monday afternoon as security forces simulated an attack against Strathmore University's Madaraka campus in the Kenyan capital - with many believing the incident was real.

A number of students from Strathmore were injured on Monday when they attempted to flee from the school - with the Kenyan Red Cross confirming that at least two patients were hospitalised.

Their condition is unknown, but the AFP news agency reported that at least one of the wounded was in critical condition. 

Local media reported that some people jumped from the third storey of a building to flee what they thought was an attack on the campus, while photographs showed others perched on the ledges of a building.

Strathmore Uni students teetering on the edge about to take a leap. it was all a drill. pic.twitter.com/O5bcmPEaHK 

— James Smart (@jamessmat) November 30, 2015 

The drill comes just months after the al-Shabab armed group staged an attack against Garissa University in Kenya's east, killing at least 147 students.

Students reported hearing a number of gunshots during the incident, but it is not known whether the gunshots were from live ammunition or blanks.

In a statement provided to Al Jazeera, the university said that prior training had been provided to teams of security marshals, comprising students and staff.

"This simulation was aimed at testing the preparedness of the university community and emergency team in the event of an attack," the statement said.

"Unfortunately some students and staff panicked and got injured. The university has assured all the students, parents and stakeholders that the situation is under control and normal operations have resumed."

The statement added that the university started an "intensive assessment of key lessons learned during this simulation" and said that the medical expenses of those injured would be catered for.

That was not a drill, that was a terror attack at #Strathmore  . A terror attack carried out by Strathmore University upon it's students.

— Sam Gichuru (@SamGichuru) November 30, 2015 

Students and others in Kenya, however, voiced their anger on Twitter, saying that the university had failed to provide adequate warning.

"It's terrifying when you see your fellow classmates jumping from 3rd floor and there is nothing you can do," one user wrote.

"That was not a drill, that was a terror attack at #Strathmore. A terror attack carried out by Strathmore University upon it's students," wrote another.

In China, Able Lawyers but No Rule of Law

In late November, Ren Jianyu, once a budding civil servant in China’s southwest, received his results for China’s National Judicial Examination: a sterling score well above what he needed to pass China’s bar. The triumph was bittersweet: for 15 months, Ren, like tens of thousands of others, had been forced to undergo “re-education through labor,” as time spent in China’s gulags is known.

Philippe Lopez—AFP/Getty ImagesProtesters holding pictures of detained Chinese human-rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang march to the Chinese Liaison Office in Hong Kong on May 14, 2014, asking for his release

Ren’s offense was to have reposted on his microblog comments critical of China’s government and its leaders. He also purchased online a T-shirt emblazoned with the motto: “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.” For these transgressions, the now 28-year-old was never given the courtesy of a proper trial. He spent his days assembling cardboard for boxes and lived 11 people to a room in a camp filled with more than 1,000 inmates. But after a local justice board deemed his case improperly handled, Ren was released early in 2012 and later compensated less than $15,000 for his suffering. “After experiencing so many things all these years,” he says, “I am not afraid anymore.”

Despite — or perhaps because of — this injustice, Ren decided that he needed to familiarize himself with China’s legal system. After he was released, families of other legal victims came to him, asking for counsel. “At the time, I didn’t understand the law,” says Ren. “When I read the piles of materials they showed to me, I didn’t know which parts were useful, which were not.”

While the re-education-through-labor program has since been officially abolished, other legal black holes suck individuals into the netherworld of the Chinese justice system — like so-called “black jails” that operate apart from official prisons and incarceration in mental hospitals for certain individuals who dare to express dissent. Chinese law also allows citizens to be held under “residential surveillance in a designated place” for six months with no charge or visits from family or lawyers. (Despite the word residential, these detentions don’t tend to happen in individuals’ own homes, and international human-rights groups say that interrogation during these periods of lockup are often accompanied by torture.)

Ren’s career choice — he is now working in the legal department of a construction company in Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese metropolis — is a risky one. China’s lawyers, especially those who specialize in “rights defense” or weiquan, are under siege. While Beijing is currently pushing a rule-of-law campaign in state media, the situation on the ground can contradict such lofty aims. In recent months, hundreds have been detained by the state for trying to hold China accountable to its own constitution, which enshrines “ruling the nation in accordance with the law.” Constitutionalism, a term once bandied about in state media, has itself transformed into a dirty word. Government officials rail against the notion of “universal human values” as being a decadent and destructive Western import.

The campaign against China’s lawyers is part of an overall crackdown on civil rights defenders that has gained momentum in recent months. Journalists, academics and civil-society activists have all been targeted in what some call the most chilling crusade against freethinking in decades. Some dissenters have disappeared into black jails or residential surveillance. Others have been sentenced to years of jail for such nebulous crimes as “picking quarrels and inviting trouble” and “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.”

On Nov. 27, writer and legal advocate Guo Feixiong (the pen name of Yang Maodong), was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment on both of those charges. He had protested, along with two others who were given lesser prison terms, against press censorship back in 2013. Since then, all three have been detained. Amnesty International alleges that they were tortured, with two of the three barred from any time outside for more than 800 days. “These three activists were simply exercising their human rights and making legitimate calls for Chinese citizens to have a greater say in their country’s future,” says Roseann Rife, East Asia research director at Amnesty International. “The chilling answer from the authorities is, yet again, anyone perceived to be challenging the government will be severely punished.”

Hours before their sentencing, a 71-year-old investigative journalist, Gao Yu — who in April was sentenced to seven years in jail for “leaking state secrets abroad,” another commonly used charge against prisoners of conscience — was released on medical parole. Her freedom is still curtailed.

The plight of China’s lawyers, journalists and other professionals hasn’t dissuaded Ren. His determination to become a lawyer was strengthened by the fate of one of China’s top human-rights lawyers, Pu Zhiqiang, who was once named lawyer of the year by a respected Chinese magazine. Pu had acted as Ren’s lawyer, and his intervention likely catalyzed Ren’s release from the labor camp. After his client was freed, Pu served as Ren’s witness at his wedding.

But in May 2014, Pu too was detained and later accused of “picking quarrels and provoking incidents” and “inciting racial hatred.” He remains locked up, with a court in Beijing this month ordering an extension to his pretrial detention. A lawyer once celebrated by the Chinese press was now considered too subversive by the state. In response to his lawyer’s detention, Ren stepped up his legal studies. “[I thought] if I could become I lawyer in the future, I could also defend people in court,” he says. “Whether my efforts are successful or not, at least I can solve problems within the scope of rule of law.”

But with little sign that this crackdown on dissent will ease, what can Ren and others accomplish? Even this newly minted lawyer is realistic. “Social progress depends on the rule of law,” Ren says. “I am kind of pessimistic about rule of law in China.”

Abortion Clinic Shooting Victims Identified

Ke'Arre Stewart, 29, was an Iraq War veteran who had recently left the military and was accompanying someone to the Planned Parenthood centre when he was killed, according to his family.

The father-of-two reportedly ran inside the building after he was shot to warn people to take cover and then rang 911 to alert authorities.

Mr Stewart was stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs until last year, when he was discharged from the US Army.

The second victim was accompanying a friend for a procedure at the clinic when she was shot and killed.

Jennifer Markovsky, 36, was the mother of two children and has been described as kind-hearted.

Her father, John Ah-King, wrote on his Facebook page: "To my daughter Jennifer I'm going to miss so much, I lost you in a senseless shooting in Colorado Springs.

Robert Lewis Dear will appear in court on Monday

"Life was too short my beloved daughter, I was waiting to see you soon.

"I'm going to miss you, my memories of you will love on in my heart and mind! Missing you!!!"

The third victim has been identified as University of Colorado police officer Garrett Swasey, 44. He also had two children.

His widow, Rachel Swasey, said in a statement on Sunday that "his last act was for the safety and well-being of others".

Former figure skating champion Nancy Kerrigan, who grew up with Mr Swasey skating in Melrose, Massachusetts, described him as a loyal and true friend.

Before he became a police officer, Mr Swasey was a junior national couples ice dancing champion.

The alleged gunman, 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear, gave himself up after a five-hour standoff with police at the clinic.

Dear, from South Carolina, will make his first court appearance on Monday.

Police have not said why the Planned Parenthood centre was attacked, but Colorado Springs mayor John Suthers said people could make "inferences from where it took place".

Dear is reported to have said "no more baby body parts" when he was arrested.

The facility has repeatedly been targeted by anti-abortion protesters and was hit by claims it sells aborted foetal tissue for profit in a series of videos earlier this year.

Facebook's St Andrew's Day Flag Muddle

The Scottish flag

Facebook encourages users to update their status to show that they are celebrating national holidays and other events.

But for several hours on Monday Scottish users could only mark their day with a status update featuring the red, yellow and blue Romanian flag.

St Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, Romania, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other countries.

One user, Kevin Gilmartin, wrote on Twitter: "Oh Facebook, random Wednesday gets a camel for humpday and you can't manage a wee Saltire for St Andrew's Day?"

Stephen Blythe added: "Well done Facebook. Romanian flag for St Andrew’s day. May have been an idea to let us Scots have a Saltire, no?"

Kathryn McBain wrote: "I think Facebook may be a little confused."

Facebook now appears to have fixed the problem, with St Andrew's Day status updates now accompanied by the Scottish flag.

Sky News has contacted Facebook for a comment.