Pinar Selek - A case of persecution in Turkey

It is hardly a secret that Turkey is a country where freedom of speech only applies if you are strong or if you side with the strong. Although one of the current administration's (AKP, whose A incidentally stands for "justice") main selling points has been the freedom of speech (Tayyip Erdoğan was sent to jail in 1999 for a poem he recited in one of his speeches) since 2002, there has hardly been an improvement on the issue; only the color of the issue has changed: now you do not get sent to jail for reciting religious-militaristic poetry, but no guarantees for anything else. Just keep it to yourself, and you will be fine. Unless some trigger-happy prosecutor somewhere singles you out that is. You will be linked to some organization or some crime at their whim. Evidence? Evidence schmevidence, mere details...

There are a high number of journalists in prison in Turkey: http://www.cpj.org/europe/turkey/ . And then some... There is one sad case that came to the headlines recently, the case of Pinar Selek, a sociologist and writer. The more you read into her case, the more you feel nauseous from all the stench that comes from her prosecution; there are so many wrong things on so many different levels. There is an explosion somewhere in Istanbul, which experts say is from the accidental ignition of a gas cylinder. Pinar Selek gets arrested on unrelated charges around the time (for being a member of PKK, a terrorist group in Turkey). She gets tortured (proven by medical reports) and at some point, they decide to charge her with the said explosion. The witness against her recants his statement, another witness cannot have given the statement as she cannot speak Turkish language and she says she does not know Pinar Selek. But that does not stop Turkish justice system (or whoever singled out Pinar Selek) and she goes to trial. She gets acquitted three times on lack of evidence as well as because of the fact that the blast is not a terrorist attack. The prosecution puts her on a retrial for the 4th time, and with some gerrymandering with the judge panel (one of the original judges is on leave, and the new judges seem to hasten her trial not to leave it to the judge who actually knows the case) they give her a lifelong sentence. You can read more about her case here: http://www.pinarselek.com/public/page_item.aspx?id=1810

There are times you feel helpless against an injustice that is being done right in front of your eyes. Many times it is only the tip of the iceberg: who knows how many similar cases there are we do not hear about. It is sickening and saddening when you think about it.  I really want to believe this story will not end here and I want to believe that justice will be served to those who perpetrated unjustice in this case. Pinar Selek, we might be silent but we are not powerless, and we are with you.

An early locked position in a Scrabble game

In a Scrabble game, towards the end of the game the board can get locked, i.e. no player can play any more words no matter how many times they exchange their tiles. I tried to come up with a locked postion early in the game, and I came up with a solution with 9 tiles on the board. The following position's lockedness comes from these facts:

• No other word starts or ends with QIS 
• No other word starts with XU
• No other word starts with SOX (and only one other word ends with it: BOBBYSOX, and that doesn't help here)
• There are words that end with Q, but it is not possible to write them in this position since there is no 2 letter word that ends with Q

I'm referring to the TWL (Tournament Word List) here, since I play Scrabble mainly on Facebook. Also one Q and one X in the diagram are produced using the two blank tiles.

Please let me know if there is a solution with fewer tiles.

Here is the locked position:

haiku

 dog paw prints 

on the base of the dirty pool

winter's dusk in cyprus

(thanks to google translate, might be off)