AJU PRESS ASIA FIRST NEWS AGENCY

Journalist

Park Sae-jin
Park Sae-jin박세진
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience. "Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
  • KAI pitches TF-50 for British trainer contract
    KAI pitches TF-50 for British trainer contract SEOUL, July 21 (AJP) - South Korea's aerospace contractor Korea Aerospace Industries is pitching its TF-50 trainer jet for a Royal Air Force competition that has not yet formally launched, using this week's Farnborough International Airshow in Britain to make its case against rivals with a significant head start. Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) said Tuesday it is showcasing next-generation air combat systems and aerospace solutions at the airshow, running July 20 to 24, as part of a push into the global market. The event, marking its fortieth edition this year, has drawn 1,500 companies from 41 countries. The Royal Air Force needs to replace its aging Hawk trainer fleet, a requirement the British government's 2025 Strategic Defence Review made explicit, and the Ministry of Defence has committed £360 million ($483.5 million) toward the overhaul, funding that will also cover new aircraft for the Red Arrows aerobatic display team. But the competition to decide which jet gets that money has not formally launched, and KAI is one of several contenders rather than the clear favorite. The leading bid appears to come from Boeing, teamed with BAE Systems and Saab, offering the T-7A Red Hawk with final assembly built in Britain, an advantage that matters because the Defence Review called for the replacement to prioritize British industrial workshare. Leonardo's M-346 and Turkish Aerospace's Hürjet are also in contention. A homegrown design from the British startup Aeralis had been floated as well, but that company has since gone into administration. KAI is instead betting on pedigree. The T-50 family, of which TF-50 is a variant, was designed from the outset as a derivative of the world's favorite jet fighter, the F-16, sharing similar wing geometry, a single-engine layout and cockpit architecture developed with Lockheed Martin, at roughly eighty percent of the F-16's physical size. Air forces that already fly the F-16 have tended to favor it for exactly that reason, since pilots trained on the T-50 family can move into F-16 cockpits with comparatively little relearning. Britain does not fly the F-16, relying instead on the Typhoon and the F-35, so that particular argument carries less direct weight in London than it has in markets where the T-50 family has found buyers. That footprint has grown considerably. The T-50 and FA-50 family now operates in seven countries with roughly 210 aircraft in service, and close to 290 once contracted and in-production units are counted, KAI's largest export presence in its aircraft class. Poland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iraq, Thailand and the Philippines all fly variants of the jet, and the aircraft is battle-proven, having flown combat missions for the Philippine Air Force during the 2017 Battle of Marawi and, more recently, for Thailand's air force during its December 2025 border conflict with Cambodia. The Philippines has continued expanding its fleet, signing a $700 million deal last year for 12 additional FA-50 Block 70 jets on top of the 12 already in service, bringing its total toward 24 aircraft with deliveries underway. KAI is pairing the TF-50 pitch with FA-50, the light attack variant of the same airframe, aimed more broadly at expanding the company's footprint across Europe. Beyond the trainer competition, KAI used the airshow to lay out a broader vision of where South Korea's combat aircraft ambitions are headed. The company presented an artificial intelligence-based logistics and support system it described as central to future warfare, then put its KF-21 Boramae, a homemade 4.5-generation fighter jet, at the center of its display, flanked by unmanned combat aircraft, a multipurpose drone and a micro synthetic aperture radar communication satellite, framed together as a single manned-unmanned combat network rather than standalone platforms. On the rotary wing side, KAI showed its marine attack helicopter, light armed helicopter and next-generation medium utility helicopter, outlining its concept for how each would be used in future operations. Throughout the run of the airshow, KAI is meeting with senior military officials and executives from partner companies across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, marketing its aircraft on NATO interoperability and delivery speed. The company also plans to deepen partnerships with GE, Safran and Martin-Baker, key suppliers of engines, avionics and ejection seats across its aircraft lines. 2026-07-21 17:48:16
  • Shin Jin-seo beats KataGo, echoes Lee Se-dols AI win
    Shin Jin-seo beats KataGo, echoes Lee Se-dol's AI win SEOUL, July 21 (AJP) - Nine years ago, a South Korean Go master sat across a board from a machine that was not supposed to be beatable. On March 13, 2016, in the fourth game of a five-game match against Google DeepMind's AlphaGo in Seoul, Lee Sedol became the only human ever to defeat that particular artificial intelligence, snapping three straight losses along the way. He would go on to lose the fifth game and the series overall, four games to one. But that one win, built around a move at position 78 so unexpected that Go commentators later nicknamed it the "divine move," became one of the defining moments in the early public understanding of what AI could and could not do. Lee retired from professional play in 2019, saying that even the best human could never again claim the top spot in Go, calling AI "an entity that cannot be defeated." Nine years later, another South Korean player picked up where Lee left off, and went further. Shin Jin-seo, the world's top-ranked Go player since 2019 and, at 26, the sport's most dominant active figure, defeated KataGo, one of the strongest Go-playing AI systems in the world, in the deciding third game of a three-game match held Tuesday in Seoul. Since turning professional at age 12 as the youngest player ever to do so in South Korea, Shin has built a career defined by consistency rather than single dramatic upsets. He has held the world number one ranking by rating points continuously since 2019 and has won nine major international titles, including three LG Cups and the 2023 Ing Cup, one of Go's most prestigious world championships. Shin won two games to one, closing out the series with an 11.5-point victory after 221 moves and roughly three hours and twenty minutes of play. The event, called the SSEN and KED Go Match, was staged at a KED TV studio in central Seoul. KataGo is a free, open-source Go program built by American developer David Wu and first released in 2019, three years after AlphaGo's match against Lee. Unlike AlphaGo, which was developed and run internally by Google DeepMind on proprietary hardware, KataGo was designed to reach superhuman strength through self-play alone, learning purely by playing itself millions of times rather than studying human game records, and to do so on far more modest computing power. It has since become one of the most widely used Go engines in the world, adopted by players and researchers alike for its ability to estimate territory and score in addition to simple win probability. The margin of victory, in some ways, was less remarkable than the terms under which it happened. AlphaGo played Lee in 2016 with no handicap at all, meeting him as a true equal on the board. KataGo, by 2025 standards a far more advanced program, needed to give Shin a two-stone head start just to play him even, and still lost the match. Most Go experts had expected Shin would be doing well to win a single game. Instead, he won two. The symbolism was not lost on the Go world. Where Lee's 2016 win stood as a lone flicker of resistance in an otherwise total defeat, a single game salvaged from a series he had no real chance of winning, Shin's performance nine years later looked more like an argument that the gap between human and machine, while still real, had not closed in the AI's favor alone. If anything, the fact that KataGo needed a handicap to stay competitive suggested developers themselves have come to treat an unhandicapped human loss as close to a foregone conclusion, making Shin's win with a head start a different kind of statement than Lee's had been. Shin's road to the win was not smooth. He lost the opening game after being caught off guard early, then rallied to take the second and third. In the deciding game, playing with the two-stone advantage, he entered with a projected win probability of 99 percent, a number that had collapsed dramatically late in each of the two earlier games, at move 70 in game one and move 160 in game two, as KataGo clawed back territory. This time, Shin held that 99 percent probability from start to finish. He had said before the match that he intended to avoid heavy fighting and win on territory instead, a more conservative approach than his usual style. He kept that promise. KataGo opened game three differently than it had the first two, taking an unfamiliar corner point that left Shin thinking for roughly two minutes before he responded. From there, both sides settled into a quiet, territorial contest with little direct confrontation. By move 80, Shin had begun pressing KataGo's white stones and building a large formation of black territory stretching from the upper side of the board toward the center, a foundation that held for the rest of the game. Shin played with five hours on the clock plus one 30-second overtime period. KataGo, running without an overall time limit, was required to move within 20 seconds each turn on a dedicated system built from four Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards hosted on the Tygem online Go server. Because KataGo is software, its moves were physically placed on the board by a human proxy, Lee Dan-bi, a professional with the Korea Baduk Association. For the win, Shin received 250 million won, about $169,000, including his match fee, along with a luxury Genesis G90 sedan as a victory prize. 2026-07-21 15:27:22
  • KMU hosts global ICT security symposium, signs 10 partnerships
    KMU hosts global ICT security symposium, signs 10 partnerships SEOUL, July 21 (AJP) - Kookmin University wrapped up a three-day international symposium on information security and e-business in Seoul earlier this month, walking away with 10 cooperation agreements signed with universities and a company abroad, the university said in a statement on Tuesday. The event, called EBISION 2026, was the second symposium held under Working Group 8.4 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), a nonprofit that coordinates ICT research across more than 100 countries. It ran from July 8 to 10 and pulled in researchers and industry officials from 11 countries. Over the three days, presenters delivered 91 papers, 50 as oral talks and the rest as posters, and more than half came from outside South Korea. Kookmin University (KMU)'s Yoo Il-sun chaired the symposium. He is a professor in the university's Department of Information Security, Cryptology and Mathematics and also directs its Global ICT Convergence Security Innovation Research Center. At the opening ceremony, President Jeong Seung-ryul told attendees that international joint research and closer industry-academia ties would be needed to keep up with AI-driven digital transformation and advances in quantum technology. Son Jin-sik, the university's vice president for planning, also attended. Six of the 10 agreements were memorandums of understanding, a firmer commitment to work together, and four were letters of intent, an earlier-stage signal that two sides plan to collaborate. Kookmin signed memorandums with National Taiwan University, Asia University, Tunghai University and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, plus King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok in Thailand and the electronics maker Delta Electronics. The letters of intent went to the Technical University of Denmark, the National Technical University of Athens, the University of Murcia in Spain and Sweden's Luleå University of Technology. The university also used the symposium to talk with Yokohama National University about launching a dual-degree program. Yokohama's vice president, Junji Shikata, was in Seoul to receive the IFIP WG 8.4 Distinguished Lecturer Award, and officials from both schools discussed student exchanges and joint teaching and research while he was there. Keynote and invited sessions featured researchers tied to several of the partner institutions. Delta Electronics chief technology officer Tei-Wei Kuo spoke on AI-driven digital transformation, and Nicola Dragoni of the Technical University of Denmark and Antonio F. Skarmeta of the University of Murcia covered cyber threat intelligence. Manos Varvarigos, a vice president at the National Technical University of Athens, presented on next-generation network architecture and security for high-performance computing. Eight companies took part in an industry session, including KT, Japan's ZenmuTech, China's Sangfor and Taiwan's AI DataBrushing, each giving technical presentations and live demonstrations. KT laid out what it calls a four-layer network security framework built for the AI and quantum era. "Researchers and industry figures in e-business information systems and ICT convergence security shared their main findings and technology trends at this symposium," Yoo said. "We will build on the memorandums and letters of intent signed during the event to develop concrete international joint research and industry-academia projects." 2026-07-21 11:07:16
  • KAIST embryo scan technique wins global fertility science award
    KAIST embryo scan technique wins global fertility science award SEOUL, July 21 (AJP) - A South Korean research team has developed a way to look inside living eggs and embryos in three dimensions without damaging them, a technique fertility specialists say could sharpen how doctors choose which embryos to implant during in vitro fertilization. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said Tuesday that the work won the Basic Science Award for Poster Presentation at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) 2026 annual meeting, held in London from July 5 to 8. The prize goes each year to the single strongest basic-science poster at the world's largest reproductive medicine conference, which drew more than 10,000 participants. Judges shortlisted five finalists from the submitted abstracts, then decided the winner after live poster presentations and questioning. The winning research came from a team led by Park Yong-keun, a physics professor at KAIST, with postdoctoral researcher Lee Chung-ha presenting the findings in London. The team paired time-lapse imaging, which follows living cells continuously without harming them, with a three-dimensional scanning method to predict early on whether an egg or embryo is likely to develop. The success of IVF often comes down to picking the right embryo. Doctors now rely mainly on two-dimensional microscope images, weighing shape, size and how the cells divide to judge which embryos have the best chance of implanting. Because those embryos may later be transferred into a patient, doctors cannot use dyes or fluorescent markers that could alter or damage them, which leaves embryologists dependent on visual judgment calls that are hard to standardize. Park's team turned to a technique called holotomography, which measures how light bends as it passes through a cell to build a three-dimensional map of its inner structure, all without staining or otherwise disturbing the living tissue. The method also captures the refractive index, a reading of how densely packed and what kind of material sits inside a cell, letting researchers spot fine internal differences that ordinary imaging misses. Testing the approach on mouse embryos, the team found that embryos less likely to reach the blastocyst stage, the point at which a fertilized egg has divided enough to prepare for implantation in the uterus, tended to show a more uneven spread of refractive index inside their cytoplasm. Tracing that unevenness in mouse eggs, the researchers linked the brightest, highest-refractive areas to lipid droplets, the small fat-storing structures scattered through the cytoplasm. The team then tried the same imaging and analysis on human eggs, not to predict how they would develop but to confirm the method could work at all beyond a mouse model. It did. The researchers captured three-dimensional refractive index maps of human eggs and put numbers to the same textural patterns, some of which again traced back to lipid droplets. But not every feature matched across species. Mouse and human eggs differ in size and internal makeup, so similar-looking optical signatures may not carry the same biological meaning. The researchers called the human trial a feasibility check rather than a proven predictive tool, and cautioned that markers developed in mice should not be applied directly to human eggs. The project brought together KAIST's physics department, the fertility center at CHA Bundang Women's Medical Center under professor Kim Ji-hyang, the London fertility clinic Avenues and Tomocube, a holotomography equipment maker Park co-founded. Findings from the mouse embryo and mouse egg studies have been posted as preprints and are under peer review at international journals. "This award matters because it recognizes the academic value of a new approach that lets us analyze living eggs and embryos in three dimensions, quantitatively, without damaging them," Park said. "We are now validating the method using human cells, and we will keep developing it into an objective, accurate evaluation technology that can help raise the success rate of infertility treatment." (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Preprint Title: Label-free 3D subcellular phenotyping of mouse embryos by holotomography enables early prediction of blastocyst formation Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.07.592317 Journal/Source: Preprint Title: Holotomography reveals biophysical remodeling of mouse oocytes during post-ovulatory aging Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.18.733271 2026-07-21 09:41:05
  • Five centuries of standing in between makes Türkiye indispensable
    Five centuries of standing in between makes Türkiye indispensable SEOUL, July 20 (AJP) - There is a reason the only direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in four years of war have happened in one city, and that city is Istanbul. Earlier this month, NATO leaders gathered in Ankara for the first summit the alliance has ever held in the Turkish capital. The choice of venue was not a courtesy. It was an acknowledgment that the country long treated as the alliance's difficult southeastern flank has become something closer to its hinge. To understand why, it helps to look past the headlines and at a much older habit. Türkiye has spent most of its history as the country in between. Istanbul was the capital of Christian Byzantium for a thousand years before it became the seat of the Islamic caliphate for nearly five hundred more. Hagia Sophia has been a cathedral, a mosque, a museum, and a mosque again, and the city has somehow absorbed each conversion without losing itself. The Ottoman Empire governed Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, and Slavs under a system that let each community keep its own courts, schools, and houses of worship. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the sultan sent ships to collect them. None of this was modern liberalism. It was something more durable: the practical knowledge that a state straddling two continents survives by holding differences together rather than resolving them. That knowledge came at a price, paid mostly at home. The republic that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built from the empire's ruins has spent a century arguing with itself about what it is: secular or religious, European or Middle Eastern, democratic or strong-handed. The argument has repeatedly turned violent. The military overthrew governments in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and pressured another from office in 1997. In July 2016, a faction of the armed forces bombed the parliament and fired on citizens. 253 people died stopping them. I spent last week in Istanbul interviewing survivors of that night, and what struck me was not their anger but their vocabulary. A businessman who lost part of his foot to a bullet told me that everyone living on Turkish soil is his family. The purges that followed the coup swept up tens of thousands and drew lasting criticism from Europe, and the wound is not closed. A country that has nearly torn itself apart this many times does not romanticize division. It learns to manage it. That learned reflex is now worth a great deal, because Türkiye's neighborhood is on fire on two sides. To the north, the war in Ukraine grinds into its fifth year. Ankara has armed Kyiv with drones, closed the Turkish straits to warships, and affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity, while refusing to join sanctions on Moscow and keeping its channels to the Kremlin open. Western capitals once called this fence-sitting. They call it something else now that it has produced the grain deal that fed markets across Africa and Asia, the largest prisoner exchanges of the war, and the only venue both sides will accept. Just last week, Türkiye's foreign minister stood in Kyiv proposing a truce covering the Black Sea and energy infrastructure, an interim step no other government is positioned to broker. To the southeast, this year's war between Israel, the United States, and Iran left Türkiye in a position no other NATO member occupies: alliance air defenses shot down Iranian ballistic missiles crossing Turkish airspace even as Ankara kept talking to Tehran. The radar at Kürecik in eastern Türkiye is the front line of Europe's missile defense against Iran. Remove Türkiye from the map, and Europe's early warning starts a thousand kilometers further west. The European Union has kept Türkiye's membership application frozen for decades, with reasons ranging from principled to reflexive. Yet the continent now finds it needs the country it would not admit. America's rethinking of its security guarantees has left Europe rearming in a hurry, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. Türkiye fields NATO's second-largest army, will command the alliance's rapid reaction force from 2028, and has grown its defense exports from under $2 billion a decade ago to a projected $11 billion this year, with its drones already embedded in European arsenals. In Ankara, alliance members announced more than $50 billion in new procurement and pledged roughly $80 billion in military support for Ukraine in 2026. Brussels still debates whether to open its new defense programs to a non-member it does not fully trust. Ankara warns that a European security architecture built without Türkiye will protect less of Europe. On the evidence of the past four years, the warning is hard to dismiss. Critics have a sharper word for all this balancing, transactionalism, the accusation that Ankara simply sells its position to every side. I would suggest the older word is better. What looks like playing both sides is, in the long Turkish habit, openness, the refusal to let any single identity, bloc, or patron claim the whole country. A state that contained Orthodox Christians and Sunni Muslims for five centuries does not find it strange to host Russians and Ukrainians at the same table. A society that argues perpetually about religion and secularism is not scandalized that the world disagrees with itself too. This openness has hard limits, and Türkiye's own citizens know them best; the decade since the coup has tested civil liberties at home even as flexibility flourished abroad. But the leaders of the Western alliance, having just left Ankara, might consider that the ally they have found hardest to categorize is valuable for precisely that reason. In a world splitting into camps, somebody has to stand in between. Türkiye has had five hundred years of practice. 2026-07-20 16:03:27
  • Türkiyes coup resisters carry wounds, no regrets
    Türkiye's coup resisters carry wounds, no regrets SEOUL, July 20 (AJP) - Ten years after a faction of the Turkish military tried to seize power on the night of July 15, 2016, the civilians who poured into the streets to stop it still carry the marks of that night, in bone, in memory, and in the quiet routines of family life. Mehmet Emin Ertaş, a 47-year-old businessman, is missing the metatarsal bone in his right foot, taken by a bullet as he ran toward soldiers firing on the crowd. Elvan Alkılıç, a 36-year-old housewife, spent the night at home with a three-month-old baby while her husband was shot through the arm and head on the Bosphorus bridge. Both spoke to Aju Press on July 17 at the July 15 memorial museum in Istanbul, days after Türkiye marked the 10th anniversary of the failed coup. The attempt was the bloodiest in modern Turkish history. Rebel soldiers blocked the Bosphorus bridge, fighter jets bombed the parliament building in Ankara, and tanks rolled through Istanbul. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reached by video call on live television, urged citizens into the streets. Thousands went. By morning the coup had collapsed, and the government counted 253 dead, most of them civilians. Their names were read aloud at this year's anniversary ceremony. The Turkish government blames the coup on followers of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric who lived in self-imposed exile in the United States from 1999 until his death in Pennsylvania in October 2024. Ankara designates his movement a terrorist organization under the name FETÖ, short for Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, and has purged tens of thousands of suspected members from the military, judiciary, and civil service since 2016. Gülen denied any role in the coup until his death, and his followers reject the designation. Ertaş was at home with his wife and three children when the shooting began. He does not describe hesitating. "If I do not have a country, my life is not important either," he said. "We are a nation in love with freedom. As the Turkish nation, we either have our freedom, or we have no life." What he saw on the street stays specific. A friend beside him was shot in the leg and fell. Another man was shot in the chest, and the crowd laid a Turkish flag on his back after he died. A third was killed by a shot through the left eye, and a fragment struck Ertaş in the face. He kept running, he said, reciting the Islamic declaration of faith, a flag draped over his own back, until a bullet found his foot about 15 meters from the soldiers' line. "I don't have my right foot's metatarsal bone," he said. "But I have my Crescent and Star flag." The wound made Ertaş a gazi, the Turkish honorific for one wounded in the service of the nation, a status the state extended to civilians hurt resisting the coup. It comes with a pension, healthcare, and public honor, and it carries deep historical weight; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the republic's founder, bore the same title. Its counterpart is şehit, or martyr, the one who dies. "I wanted to be a martyr, but I was granted the status of a gazi," Ertaş said. "May God never show us those days again." The title sits oddly on him, and he knows it. Ertaş never served in the military. He paid 30,000 liras under Türkiye's paid exemption system, which allows some men to skip conscription. "I think I am the only one who did not go to the military but became a gazi," he said. He refuses to call the men who fired on the crowd soldiers at all. "They were thieves who stole military uniforms," he said, using the word Mehmetçik, the affectionate Turkish term for the common soldier, to describe what the putschists were not. "When the state needs it, we are all Mehmetçik." Asked about foreign criticism that Türkiye's punishment of the plotters has been too harsh, Ertaş did not soften. Turkish courts have handed down hundreds of life sentences in mass trials since 2016, and some Western governments and rights groups have said the crackdown swept up people with no connection to the coup. "My personal conviction is that anyone who betrays their own country, wherever they are in the world, whoever they are, should be executed in the first degree," he said. Türkiye abolished the death penalty in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union, and no coup convict has faced execution. Alkılıç experienced the night from the other side of the door. Her husband Ahmet, an architect who stands 1.93 meters tall, left their Istanbul home after the first reports of tanks in the streets. Her own relatives were away at a summer house, leaving her alone with three children, the youngest three months old. "I said, please don't go," she recalled. "He said, don't worry, I will come back. But my phone's battery is dead, don't be scared. I said okay, but I already had a bad feeling." Ahmet reached the Bosphorus bridge, where rebel soldiers had opened fire on the gathering crowd. In the second volley, a bullet passed through his arm and his head as he dove for cover. Thirty-four civilians were killed on the bridge that night, according to the indictment later filed against the soldiers there. The bridge has since been renamed the July 15 Martyrs Bridge. At home, Alkılıç knew none of this. When low-flying F-16s shook the house like an earthquake and her eldest son woke asking where his father was, she told him a small lie. "I said, son, go back to sleep, your dad went to buy baby formula for your sibling," she said. "He went to sleep like that." Ahmet survived, but the first five months were the hardest. The head wound took his speech. "He could not speak. My husband was speaking like a baby," Alkılıç said. "It took one or two years of our lives." He recovered and works again as an architect. The children are now 18, 14, and 10. What remains is physical memory: when fighter jets pass low near the airport, she said, her skin still prickles. Asked whether she ever wished she had stopped him, she said the family has settled the question differently. If it happened again, she said, they would not split up. "Now we all go out together," she said. 2026-07-20 13:49:54
  • Istanbul purrs with beloved cats
    Istanbul purrs with beloved cats SEOUL, July 20 (AJP) - They sleep on the warm hoods of parked taxis and in the display windows of carpet shops. They wait outside fish restaurants with the patience of regulars. They stroll into mosques, curl up on prayer rugs, and no one moves them. In Istanbul, a city of some 16 million people, the cats behave less like strays and more like citizens who happen to have four legs, and the city, for the most part, treats them accordingly. Nobody knows exactly how many there are. Estimates run from more than a hundred thousand to well beyond, and any count would be out of date by morning. What is certain is that they are everywhere, and that they have been for a very long time. The story begins, as so many Istanbul stories do, at the water. For more than two thousand years, first as Byzantium, then Constantinople, then Istanbul, the city sat at the meeting point of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Europe, and Asia, one of the busiest crossroads of trade in the world. Ships arrived loaded with grain, and grain drew rats, and rats made a ship's cat as essential a crew member as a navigator. When the ships docked, some of the cats went ashore to explore the quays and never reported back for duty. The city, full of granaries, markets, and wooden houses that sheltered rodents by the thousand, gave them every reason to stay. They were not pets. They were workers, and Istanbul had endless work. Faith gave the arrangement its warmth. In Islamic tradition, cats are regarded as clean animals, permitted to wander freely where dogs are often kept at a distance, and stories of kindness toward them run deep. One of the most prolific narrators of the Prophet Muhammad's sayings is known to history as Abu Hurairah, literally "father of the kitten," a nickname earned from the small cat he carried with him. A beloved tale holds that the Prophet once cut off his sleeve rather than wake the cat sleeping on it. The story's origins are hazy, and scholars debate its authenticity, but its power was never really about the paperwork. It taught generations of Muslims that disturbing a sleeping cat was something even a prophet would not do. Ottoman Istanbul turned that sentiment into institutions. Residents endowed charitable foundations to feed street animals. Vendors known as mancaci walked the streets selling scraps of offal and liver so that passersby could buy a portion and feed the neighborhood cats in the name of God, an early form of subscription-based animal welfare. Sultan Abdulhamid II, who ruled from 1876 to 1909, kept well over a thousand cats at Yildiz Palace. European travelers wrote home, sometimes charmed and sometimes baffled, about a city that fed its animals as a matter of routine piety. That habit never died. It modernized. Today, the care of Istanbul's street cats is a shared enterprise between the government and roughly everyone else. District municipalities run veterinary clinics and mobile units that sterilize, vaccinate, tag, and release street animals, a policy anchored in Türkiye's 2004 animal protection law, which required that strays be returned to where they were found after treatment. Feeding stations and small wooden cat houses, some municipal, some built by residents on their own initiative, appear on sidewalks and in parks, often freshly stocked. Solar-powered vending machines developed by a Turkish company dispense kibble and water when someone deposits a plastic bottle for recycling, a contraption that pays for the food with the value of the recovered plastic. The animals learned where the machines stood and began waiting beside them. But the infrastructure is only half the system. The other half is habit, distributed across millions of people. The fishmonger who sets aside trimmings. The office worker who keeps a bag of dry food in a desk drawer. The shopkeeper who lets a tabby claim the cash counter as her personal territory because the customers like her and, frankly, so does he. Water bowls appear outside apartment buildings each summer without anyone organizing them. Feeding the cats is not charity in Istanbul so much as etiquette. The result is a species that lives in the seam between wild and owned. Istanbul's cats belong to no one and to everyone. They have names, usually several, one per street they patrol. They have favorite ferries and preferred pews. For years, a cross-eyed cat named Gli lived inside Hagia Sophia itself, dozing beside the imperial door through the building's years as a museum and into its reconversion to a mosque, photographed by presidents and tourists alike until she died in 2020. When a portly street cat named Tombili died in 2016, her neighborhood in Kadikoy erected a bronze statue of her in her signature pose, reclining against a step like a retiree watching traffic. Tens of thousands had signed the petition. It is tempting to leave the story there, sun-warmed and purring. But the compact between Türkiye and its street animals has been under real strain, and the cats came closer to the edge of it than most visitors realize. In July 2024, Türkiye's parliament passed a law requiring municipalities to remove stray dogs from the streets and hold them in shelters, with euthanasia permitted for animals that are terminally ill, in pain, or judged a danger to people. The government, citing an estimated four million stray dogs nationwide and a series of attacks, some involving children, framed the measure as overdue public safety. Opponents called it the "massacre law." Animal welfare groups pointed out that the country's shelters had capacity for only a fraction of the dogs the law ordered off the streets, and warned that cash-strapped municipalities might find euthanasia cheaper than care. Tens of thousands protested in Istanbul and other cities. In late 2025, the Constitutional Court rejected the main opposition party's bid to annul the law, ruling that animals are not subjects of rights under the constitution. Several judges dissented, arguing the law contradicted values of compassion toward animals rooted in the same Islamic legal tradition that had sheltered Istanbul's strays for centuries. The cats were spared, but narrowly. An early draft of the bill included them. The article was removed after public outcry, before the law reached its final vote. So the cats of Istanbul remain where they have always been, on the steps and the windowsills and the warm stones of the mosque courtyards, protected by fifteen centuries of habit and, for now, by a single deleted clause. A 55-year-old juice stall owner near Hagia Sophia, who declined to give his name, said the animals were woven into the life of the city itself. "We consider cats as our family and neighbors. Their elegance and companionship bring us joy and happiness. Istanbul will never be the same without them," he said. 2026-07-20 09:58:34
  • Ten years on, Türkiyes fallen answer roll call
    Ten years on, Türkiye's fallen answer roll call ANKARA, July 15 (AJP) - The name of a dead man rang out over a sunbaked park in Ankara on Wednesday, and thousands of voices answered for him. "Burada!" the crowd shouted. Here. Present. Another name followed, and another answer. It went on 253 times, once for each person killed on the night of July 15, 2016, when a faction of the Turkish military tried to seize the state and the public walked into gunfire to stop it. To a foreign ear, the word sounded uncannily like "brother," and for several minutes, it felt as if the crowd was claiming kinship with the dead. A Turkish official seated nearby corrected me. The word means "here," she explained. When the names of martyrs are read aloud in Türkiye, the living answer the roll call on their behalf. The dead are not absent. They are present. That conviction, that the fallen of July 15 remain on duty, was the emotional engine of the ceremony held Wednesday at Baskent Millet Bahcesi, a vast public park in central Ankara, to mark the 10th anniversary of the failed coup. The government has designated the date July 15 Democracy and National Unity Day, and this year's program carried the theme "The Will Is Ours, The Victory Is Ours." The coup attempt began on the evening of July 15, 2016, when rogue military units seized bridges in Istanbul, sent tanks into the streets and bombed government buildings in Ankara, including the parliament and the police headquarters. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, vacationing on the Aegean coast, escaped an assassination attempt and called on citizens by video link to resist. They did, in numbers that stunned the plotters. Civilians lay down in front of tanks and stormed occupied installations. By morning the coup had collapsed. The night left 253 people dead and 2,737 wounded, figures the state has since enshrined as a national epic. Ankara blames the network of Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric whose followers had spent decades embedding themselves in the military, police and judiciary. The government designates the movement the Gulenist Terror Organization, or FETO. Gulen, who denied involvement, died in Pennsylvania in October 2024. The choice of venue on Wednesday was not incidental. The park, opened in 2023 on the grounds of the capital's old hippodrome, sits directly across the road from the Ankara Provincial Police Directorate, one of the buildings pounded by tanks, helicopters and F-16s on the night of the coup. Erdogan pointed to it from the stage. "The Ankara Provincial Police Department building right across from us became the target of tanks, helicopters and F-16s," he said. "In these attacks, seven police officers and six civilians, a total of 13 heroes, marched to martyrdom in front of the Ankara Police Department." In Ankara alone, he said, 149 people were killed that night and 1,508 wounded. The ceremony unfolded under a hard July sun. Attendees entered through a park gate, crossed a stretch of grass and gathered on a broad asphalt clearing where heat rose visibly from the ground. The crowd numbered in the thousands and spanned generations: elderly men and women who lived through the night itself, parents with children on their shoulders, and kids who were not yet born in 2016 shouting "Burada!" with everyone else, answering for the dead of a night they never saw. The stage carried its own history lesson, flanked on one side by soldiers bearing the flags of the 16 Turkish states of history and on the other by guards in Ottoman janissary dress. From a seat some 30 meters away, Erdogan was close enough to watch, but the crowd stretched back far beyond the reach of any single pair of eyes. The sound carried everything. After the roll call came prayer. Tayyib Hos, imam of the Bestepe Millet Mosque at the Presidential Complex, recited verses from the Quran in the melodic style familiar from mosque loudspeakers across the Muslim world. Safi Arpagus, head of Türkiye's Directorate of Religious Affairs, then led a prayer for the fallen. Thousands of people raised their hands, palms open to the sky, in the Muslim posture of supplication. Then Erdogan spoke, and he spoke less like a head of state than like a man reading letters from the dead. He told the crowd about Varol Tosun, a police officer killed outside the headquarters across the road. "His wife would sometimes ask him, are you not afraid of anything? Our martyr would answer his wife like our Master Hamza: I fear nothing that my eyes can see." He told them about Omer Ipek, who left his house that night knowing what was coming. "As he left the house that night, he told his older sister, I want to leave a beautiful country for my children," Erdogan said. "To his father, he said, I am going to become a martyr, my children are entrusted to you." He told them about Volkan Canoz, killed at 29, and Muhammed Oguz Kilinc, a police officer's son who died at 26. "I have countless memories of that night for every single one of our 253 martyrs and 2,737 veterans," Erdogan said. "If we tried to tell them one by one, believe me, our hearts could not bear it." The president framed the night of the coup as a resurrection of the spirit of Türkiye's War of Independence a century earlier, and the plotters as instruments of foreign powers. "That night, against the Hashashin gang serving imperialism, we said, just as we did a century ago," he declared, before reciting lines from the national poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy: "I have lived free since the beginning and will live free. What madman will put me in chains?" He reserved his harshest language for the plotters themselves, calling those who have betrayed the nation throughout history "a herd of mankurts," invoking a Central Asian literary figure of a slave stripped of memory and identity. "They are sellouts who dagger their state and nation in the back for the sake of worldly interests," he said. The speech was also a message to the present. Erdogan credited the endurance of his governing coalition, the People's Alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party, whose leader Devlet Bahceli he greeted from the stage, with keeping the country safe from a repeat. "I believe that, by Allah's leave, as long as the People's Alliance remains strong, Turkey will no longer experience dark times," he said. "As long as this nation remains awake, locked together, and protects its unity and solidarity, no one will be able to chain its will." Critics at home and abroad have long noted that the decade since the coup also brought sweeping purges, with tens of thousands of soldiers, police officers, judges and teachers dismissed or jailed over alleged Gulenist ties, and a broad concentration of presidential power. None of that shadow reached the park on Wednesday. What filled the asphalt clearing instead was grief organized into ritual, a state liturgy in which the dead are summoned by name and the living answer for them. Erdogan closed with a warning drawn from the coup night itself, quoting a man who faced down soldiers on Istanbul's Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge. "A person dies only once. But they die like a man," he said. "Our state has the power to eliminate any threat directed at it, and to crush the heads of the traitors who try to raise them. Everyone should make their calculations and keep their books accordingly." 2026-07-16 06:26:39
  • Erdoğan calls July 15 resistance unparalleled in democratic history
    Erdoğan calls July 15 resistance unparalleled in democratic history SEOUL, July 15 (AJP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the popular resistance that defeated the July 15, 2016 coup attempt stands unmatched in the history of world democracy, crediting the nation's willingness to die for its independence with powering Türkiye's rise as a global actor over the past decade. "The Turkish nation's prudence, courage, and foresight on the night of 15 July are also unprecedented in the history of world democracy," Erdoğan said in a written statement marking the 10th anniversary of the failed coup, released Wednesday. The statement comes as Türkiye holds commemorations in all 81 provinces and at its diplomatic missions abroad for Democracy and National Unity Day, the national observance established after the events of 2016. On the night of July 15 that year, a faction within the Turkish military attempted to seize power, bombing the parliament in Ankara and deploying tanks onto the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul. Erdoğan, speaking by video call on a news anchor's phone, urged citizens into the streets. Crowds surrounded military units and climbed onto tanks, and the coup collapsed before dawn. At least 251 people were killed and more than 2,000 wounded; official commemorations now honor 253 victims, a figure Erdoğan cited in his statement. Ankara attributes the attempt to the network of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric who lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania from 1999 until his death in October 2024 and who denied involvement until the end. The Turkish government designates the network a terrorist organization, calling it the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, or FETÖ. The years after the coup attempt saw tens of thousands of soldiers, judges, prosecutors, teachers, and civil servants dismissed or detained in one of the largest purges in the republic's history, a crackdown Western governments criticized for its scale. In his statement, Erdoğan described the attempt as "far more than a conventional coup attempt" and called it "an all-out act of invasion directed against our country's independence." He said the resistance of that night underpins Türkiye's current international standing. "If Türkiye is now regarded as a country whose contribution is sought, whose word carries weight, and who is consulted on regional and global matters, behind this success lies the will of our august nation, who stood up for their independence and future at the cost of their lives on the night of 15 July," he said. The president pointed to the decade's gains in the defense, aviation, and space industries under the National Technology Move, naming the TOGG electric car, the KAAN fighter jet, national corvettes, and Turkish drones among the country's globally recognized products. Erdoğan also warned that FETÖ remains active despite what he described as an accelerating internal disintegration of its overseas network over the past two years, and accused unnamed countries of covertly supporting the organization and harboring its members. "Our primary expectation from the global community is to support Türkiye's legitimate struggle," he said. "Global peace, security, and prosperity can only be achieved through a resolute and uncompromising fight against terrorist organisations without any distinction and through sincere cooperation." The full text of the statement follows. "Resistance of 15 July is unparalleled in the history of world democracy" One of the most brutal coup attempts in Türkiye's political history took place exactly ten years ago, on 15 July 2016. Orchestrated by a terrorist network that had insidiously infiltrated the institutions of our state, this coup attempt sought to plunge Türkiye into years of chaos and subjugate the future of our nation. By standing up for their independence and future to confront the coup plotters, our august nation asserted to the entire world through their heroic resistance that the will of the people can never be subjugated on these lands. Undoubtedly, the Turkish nation's prudence, courage, and foresight on the night of 15 July are also unprecedented in the history of world democracy. This treacherous insurrection by the Fetullahist Terrorist Organisation (FETO) was far more than a conventional coup attempt; it was an all-out act of invasion directed against our country's independence. The primary targets of the putschists were the emblematic institutions that embody the national will and our nation's independence, namely the Presidential Complex and the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye. On the night of 15 July, I underlined in my public statement that I had never recognised any power greater than that of the people. I made that statement in full confidence that the Turkish nation would stand firm in defence of its own will. Indeed, that very night, our people took to the streets with unwavering faith and determination, refusing to submit to the domination of this terrorist organisation. Risking their lives to defend the independence of their country, its democratic achievements, and its free will, our nation repelled the putschists and inscribed an epic of national will that shall be remembered with pride for generations to come. Inspired by the brave stance of our nation, we acted swiftly to eliminate any negative consequences of this treacherous insurrection. We promptly introduced comprehensive structural reforms to eliminate from all state institutions any anti-democratic formations that could threaten democratic governance through extra-political means. We subsequently attained critical achievements through operations conducted both at home and abroad as part of our strategy to eliminate the other terrorist organisations we have been combating. Ultimately, we launched the Terror-Free Türkiye initiative, marking a new chapter in our nation's story of unity and solidarity. This process, one of the essential cornerstones of our 'Century of Türkiye' vision, is, praise be to Allah, advancing firmly towards its destination with an all-encompassing and inclusive approach through the diligence of our security forces and the support of the political establishment. I believe the success of the 'Terror-free Türkiye' process will contribute not only to the peace and tranquillity of our country but also to that of our region. As a result of our struggle against those who attempted this coup and also targeted our country's economic prosperity and development, we have taken significant steps towards a more prosperous future through the projects we have launched in sectors such as energy, transport, healthcare, agriculture, technology, and defence. With the National Technology Move, we have made significant strides in the defence, aviation, and space industries over the past decade. We have developed electric and smart transport systems, and through substantial investment in the health and agriculture sectors, we have strived to live up to the sacrifices of our people. During this process, we have also developed our brand products, which have gained worldwide recognition. Among these, our electric automobile, the TOGG; our national fighter aircraft, the KAAN; our national corvettes; and our unmanned aerial vehicles are the first that spring to mind. On the other hand, over the past 10 years, Türkiye has emerged as an effective actor in the resolution of crises and conflicts at both regional and global levels, guided by an enterprising foreign policy approach. In all crisis regions, we have not hesitated to assume responsibility for maintaining peace and tranquillity by supporting the oppressed and the righteous, rather than the powerful. Wherever there is oppression or injustice, we have been the voice of international law, justice, and conscience. If Türkiye is now regarded as a country whose contribution is sought, whose word carries weight, and who is consulted on regional and global matters, behind this success lies the will of our august nation, who stood up for their independence and future at the cost of their lives on the night of 15 July. The fight against terrorism, in which international cooperation is essential, retains its prominent place on our foreign policy agenda. As is well known, the process of internal disintegration within FETO's overseas network has accelerated over the past two years. That said, we are aware that some countries are covertly providing support to this organisation and are harbouring its members. I would like to take this opportunity to underscore the necessity of maintaining vigilance against FETO, which considers all means permissible to achieve its ambitions, adopts every possible guise, and does not hesitate to exploit every concept, including democracy, freedom, and human rights. As a nation that saw 253 of its sons and daughters martyred by the putschists on the night of 15 July, our primary expectation from the global community is to support Türkiye's legitimate struggle. Global peace, security, and prosperity can only be achieved through a resolute and uncompromising fight against terrorist organisations without any distinction and through sincere cooperation. Recep Tayyip ERDOĞAN President of the Republic of Türkiye 2026-07-15 09:00:00
  • Most Korean trade firms say foreign workers help business
    Most Korean trade firms say foreign workers help business SEOUL, July 13 (AJP) - Nearly three in four South Korean trade companies that employ foreign workers say those workers have a positive effect on their business, and most see them filling jobs Koreans avoid rather than taking jobs from them, a large industry survey showed Monday. The Korea International Trade Association (KITA) released the findings at a forum in Seoul on reshaping the country's foreign workforce and immigration policy, as a shrinking working-age population pushes labor shortages up the list of threats to the South Korean economy. The country recorded the world's lowest fertility rate for years running, and its pool of workers aged 15 to 64 has been contracting since 2020. The survey of 10,040 trade companies, conducted with the Korea Sanhak Foundation from December last year to February, found that 73.4 percent of firms employing foreign workers said the workers benefited their operations. Asked about the workers' role, 44.2 percent said foreign staff complemented their workforce by taking on processes and tasks that Korean workers shun, while only 16.2 percent said they substituted for local hires. Companies named faster and simpler visa procedures, better matching of workers to jobs, and systems for training and retaining skilled workers long term as their top requests. KITA Chairman Yoon Jin-sik told the forum that the issue reaches beyond filling vacancies. "Foreign workforce and immigration policy is a task directly tied to industrial competitiveness and the foundation for sustainable growth of the Korean economy," Yoon said, calling for institutional groundwork that lets companies secure the talent they need and allows skilled workers to keep contributing. The forum, held at Trade Tower in southern Seoul, drew about 100 participants, including Kang Min-hwi, head of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in South Korea, along with foreign scholars invited to compare how other economies manage the same demographic squeeze. Their diagnoses converged on a single point: what matters is not how many workers a country admits, but what happens after they arrive. Anna Maria Mayda, a Georgetown University economist, described the American model of drawing in talent through study and temporary work visas, then filtering workers into long-term residence according to labor market demand. Gracia Liu-Farrer, a professor at Waseda University, said Japan never branded itself an immigration country but built a system in which company-based training turns foreign workers into skilled long-term residents, a linkage she said South Korea should replicate. Yun-Hsiang Hsu, an associate professor at Taiwan's National Central University, pointed to the downside of Taiwan's reliance on private brokers, which delivers workers quickly but saddles them with high fees and drives turnover. He argued for combining private-sector speed with public oversight, and for connecting skill and tenure to longer stays. Herbert Brücker, a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin, called immigration a core answer to workforce decline and stressed integrated settlement systems that tie qualification recognition to vocational training, language education and job support. Drawing on the survey, Lee Kyu-yong, a senior research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, urged South Korea to move away from managing inflows, the question of whom to admit and in what numbers, toward a utilization strategy that designs skill formation, career development, visa transition and regional settlement as a single package. KITA said it has been preparing policy recommendations based on studies of major economies, the company survey and expert consultations, and plans to publish the full proposal in August after gathering further input from the forum. 2026-07-13 11:41:33