Turkish teen arrested for insulting Erdogan


Turkish police arrested a 16-year-old high school student for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, local media reported Thursday. The boy was shown in a video reading a statement commemorating the killing of a Turkish soldier by Islamists nearly a century ago, then making a declaration invoking the memory of the founder of the modern Turkish republic — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — deemed harshly critical of the pro-Islamist Erdogan. As the boy spoke, people around him chanted, "Everywhere is bribery, everywhere is corruption."
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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