Year of dictators mom
The week's news at a glance.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
The Turkmen parliament has declared 2003 the “Year of the Turkmen heroine Gurbansoltan Niyazova, the mother of the first and eternal president of Turkmenistan.” The parliament, a rubber-stamp body that exists only to fawn over dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, praised his late mother as “a spiritual and moral ideal to which all women and mothers should aspire.” Niyazov, who brutally suppresses all political speech and has his opponents tortured, has already renamed the month of April after his mother and declared her birthplace a national shrine. She died in an earthquake in 1948, when he was just 8.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’
Feature A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries
By The Week US Published
-
The backlash against ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli filter
The Explainer The studio's charming style has become part of a nebulous social media trend
By Theara Coleman, The Week US Published
-
Why are student loan borrowers falling behind on payments?
Today's Big Question Delinquencies surge as the Trump administration upends the program
By Joel Mathis, The Week US Published