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Levant Quartet
The Levant Quartet was a formal economic and cultural partnership of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan formed in December 2010. The Quartet had the stated aim of eventually giving rise to an economic, cultural, monetary and political union similar to the European Union in the Middle East. Projected member states included the four founders as well as Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The Quartet agreement was formed following a decade of increasing trade and diplomatic traffic between Turkey and the other member states. The ''Levant Business Forum'' was set up, with a secretariat at Beirut, with the intention of enabling free circulation of goods and people among the Quartet states. Also planned was a customs union called ''Shamgen'', a pun on '' Sham'' and the EU's Schengen Agreement, in which Iran and Iraq would participate by issuing joint visas with Turkey and Syria. The project was effectively put to a stop when Turke ...
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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician serving as the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, leading it to election victories in 2002, 2007, and 2011 general elections before being required to stand down upon his election as president in 2014. He later returned to the AKP leadership in 2017 following the constitutional referendum that year. Coming from an Islamist political background and self-describing as a conservative democrat, he has promoted socially conservative and populist policies during his administration. Following the 1994 local elections, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul as the candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party. He was later stripped of his position, banned from political office, and imprisoned for four months for inciting reli ...
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The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, as ''The Atlantic Monthly'', a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the Antislavery Movement In America, abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. In addition, ''The Atlantic Monthly Almanac'' was an annual almanac published for ''Atlantic Monthly'' readers during the 19th and 20th centuries. A change of name was not officially announced when the format first changed from a strict monthly (appearing 12 times a year) to a slightly l ...
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Accession Of Turkey To The European Union
Turkey is negotiating its accession to the European Union (EU) as a member state, following its application to become a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the EU, on 14 April 1987. After the ten founding members in 1949, Turkey became one of the first new members ( the 13th member) of the Council of Europe in 1950. The country became an associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1963 and was an associate member of the Western European Union from 1992 to its end in 2011. Turkey signed a Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995 and was officially recognised as a candidate for full membership on 12 December 1999, at the Helsinki summit of the European Council. Negotiations for full membership were started on 3 October 2005. Progress was slow: out of the 35 chapters necessary to complete the accession process, only 16 had been opened and one had been closed by May 2016. The early 2016 refugee deal between Turkey and ...
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Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the seventh most populous. Its capital is Brasília, and its most populous city is São Paulo. The federation is composed of the union of the 26 states and the Federal District. It is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language and the only one in the Americas; one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse nations, due to over a century of mass immigration from around the world; and the most populous Roman Catholic-majority country. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of . It borders all other countries and territories in South America except Ecuador and Chile and covers roughly half of the continent's land area. Its Amazon basin includes a vast tropical forest, ho ...
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AK Party
The Justice and Development Party ( tr, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, ; AKP), abbreviated officially AK Party in English, is a political party in Turkey self-describing as conservative-democrat. It is one of the two major parties of contemporary Turkey along with the Republican People's Party (CHP). Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chairman of AKP since the 2017 Party Congress. The AKP is the largest party in the Grand National Assembly, the Turkish national legislature, with 285 out of 600 seats, having won 42.6% of votes in the 2018 Turkish parliamentary election. It forms the People's Alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The current AKP parliamentary leader is İsmet Yılmaz. Founded in 2001 by members of a number of parties such as FP, ANAP and DYP, the party has a strong base of support among people from the conservative tradition of Turkey, though the party strongly denies it is Islamist. The party positioned itself as pro-liberal market economy, supp ...
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Soner Cagaptay
Soner Cagaptay (; born in 1970) is a Turkish-American political scientist based in the United States. He is director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.Expert biography http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/view/cagaptay-soner He is a historian by training and is an expert on Turkey–United States relations, Turkish politics, and Turkish nationalism. Education Cagaptay received his Ph.D. degree in history from Yale University in 2003. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Turkish nationalism. Besides English and Turkish, his research languages include French, German, Spanish, Bosnian, Hebrew, Azerbaijani, and Ottoman Turkish. Career Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale, Princeton University, Georgetown University, and Smith College on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. Fro ...
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World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA), two of five international organizations owned by the World Bank Group. It was established along with the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. After a slow start, its first loan was to France in 1947. In the 1970s, it focused on loans to developing world countries, shifting away from that mission in the 1980s. For the last 30 years, it has included NGOs and environmental groups in its loan portfolio. Its loan strategy is influenced by the Sustainable Development Goals as well as environmental and social safeguards. , the World Bank is run by a president and 25 executive directors, as well as 29 various vic ...
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World Bank Group
The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and best-known development bank in the world and an observer at the United Nations Development Group. The bank is headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States. It provided around $98.83 billion in loans and assistance to "developing" and transition countries in the 2021 fiscal year. The bank's stated mission is to achieve the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity.The World Bank, Press release: "World Bank Group Commitments Rise Sharply in FY14 Amid Organizational Change"July 1 2014, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/01/world-bank-group-commitments-rise-sharply-in-fy14-amid-organizational-change/ref> Total lending as of 2015 for the last 10 years through Development Policy Financing was approximately $117 billion. Its five organizations are the International Bank for Reconst ...
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Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio, ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', ''Bloomberg Markets'', Bloomberg.com, and Bloomberg's mobile platforms. Since 2015, John Micklethwait has served as editor-in-chief. History Bloomberg News was founded by Michael Bloomberg and Matthew Winkler in 1990 to deliver financial news reporting to Bloomberg Terminal subscribers. The agency was established in 1990 with a team of six people. Winkler was first editor-in-chief. In 2010, Bloomberg News included more than 2,300 editors and reporters in 72 countries and 146 news bureaus worldwide. Beginnings (1990–1995) Bloomberg Business News was created to expand the services offered through the terminals. According to Matthew Winkler, then a writer for ''The Wall Street Journal ...
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Al-Arabiya
Arabiya ( ar, العربية, transliterated: '; meaning "The Arabic One" or "The Arab One") is an international Arabic news television channel, currently based in Dubai, that is operated by the media conglomerate MBC. The channel is a flagship of the media conglomerate and is therefore the only single offering to carry the name as simply "Al Arabiya" in its branding. History Launched on 3 March 2003, the channel is based in Dubai Media City, United Arab Emirates. An early funder, the production company Middle East News (then headed by Ali Al-Hedeithy), said the goal was to provide "a balanced and less provocative" alternative to Al Jazeera, which had already found widespread success by then. A free-to-air channel, Al Arabiya broadcasts standard newscasts every hour, as well as talk shows and documentaries. These programs primarily cover current affairs, business, stock markets, and sports. It is rated among the top pan-Arab stations by Middle East audiences.Peter Feuilhe ...
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