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MOSCOW (AP) —
Sharply raising the stakes in Moscow's spat with Ankara, Russia's top military brass on Wednesday accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family of personally profiting from oil trade with Islamic State militants.
The bluntly-worded accusations follow Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane at the Syrian border last week, the first time a NATO member shot down a Russian aircraft in more than half a century. The fierce personal attack on Erdogan reflects the Kremlin's anger and signals that Russia-Turkey tensions will likely continue to escalate.
The Russian Defense Ministry invited dozens of foreign military attaches and hundreds of journalists to produce what they said were satellite and aerial images of thousands of oil trucks streaming from the IS-controlled deposits in Syria and Iraq into Turkish sea ports and refineries.
"The main customer for this oil stolen from Syria and Iraq is Turkey," said Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov. "The top political leadership of the country, President Erdogan and his family, is involved in this criminal business."
The Turkish leader has denied Russian President Vladimir Putin's earlier claims of Turkey's involvement in oil trade with the IS, and has pledged to step down if Moscow proves its accusations.
"No one has the right to make such a slander as to suggest that Turkey buys Daesh's oil. Turkey has not lost its moral values as to buy oil from a terror organization," Erdogan said in Wednesday's speech at Qatar University, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, shortly after the Russian Defense Ministry made the claims. "Those who make such slanderous claims are obliged to prove them. If they do I would not remain on the presidential seat for one minute. But those who make the claim must also give up their seat if they can't prove it."
The Russian plane's downing has badly strained the relationship between the two nations that had earlier developed close economic ties. Russia has responded by deploying long-range air defense missiles at its air base in Syria and slamming Turkey with an array of economic sanctions.
Erdogan warned Wednesday that "if Russia's disproportionate reactions continue, we will be forced to take our own measures."
Antonov, meanwhile, said that IS militants make $2 billion a year from the illegal oil trade, and he squarely put the personal blame on Erdogan.
"Maybe I'm speaking too bluntly, but the control over that thievish business could only be given to the closest people," Antonov said, adding that Erdogan's son heads a top energy company and his son-in-law has been named Turkey's energy minister.
"What a great family business!" Antonov said with sarcasm. "Obviously, no one but the closest people could be entrusted to control such dealings."
Antonov didn't provide any specific evidence to back up the claims of personal involvement of Erdogan and his family in the oil trade with the IS.
"Turkish leaders, including Mr. Erdogan, won't step down and they won't acknowledge anything even if their faces are smeared with the stolen oil," he added.
Lt.-Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military's General Staff said Russian airstrikes on the IS oil infrastructure in Syria had halved the militants' profits. He said the Russian air raids have destroyed 32 oil production facilities, 11 refineries and 1,080 oil trucks since they began on Sept. 30.
Turkey has said it downed the Russian plane after it intruded its airspace for 17 seconds despite numerous warnings, and has refused to apologize for the shoot-down. The Russian pilot was killed by militants after bailing out from the plane and a Russian marine was also killed on a rescue mission to retrieve a second pilot.
Russia has insisted that its plane remained in Syrian airspace and has denounced the Turkish action as a "treacherous stab in the back."
Erdogan has voiced regret over the incident, but Putin has made it clear that he expects a formal apology. The Russian leader refused to meet with Erdogan at a global climate in Paris, which they both attended Monday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday that he would agree to meet with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on the sidelines of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting of foreign ministers in Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
"We will meet with the Turkish minister of foreign affairs, we will hear what he has to say," Lavrov said after talks with his Cypriot counterpart in Nicosia.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The House moved toward a vote Wednesday on a long-sought rewrite of the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law that would roll back the federal government's authority to push academic standards and tell failing schools how to improve.
The legislation, a compromise reached by House and Senate negotiators, would continue No Child's requirement for annual reading and math testing of children in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But it would shift back to the states the decision-making power over how to use students' performance on the tests to assess teachers and schools. The measure also would end federal efforts to tie test scores to teacher evaluations.
"I think that we will have a strong majority of the majority, and we'll have a strong majority of the minority," said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., who led the House-Senate conference committee on the legislation. "The big picture here is that the bill moves from this massive intrusion of the federal government, moves back to state and local control."
A compromise bill was a long time coming. No Child Left Behind, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, ushered in a new era of accountability standards and testing for the nation's public schools. But it subsequently fell into disfavor in some quarters, widely criticized as unworkable, unrealistic and too punitive for educators.
The law has been due for renewal since 2007, but it got caught up in the broader debate over the federal role in public education.
"It's been a long road and it's a good bill," said Kline's Democratic counterpart on the committee, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia. "We don't tell states what to do...but it's clear that they have to have high standards and address in a meaningful way any achievement gaps."
Despite the bipartisan support, some conservative lawmakers have said they won't support it. And civil rights groups are giving it only lukewarm support, saying it's an improvement over No Child Left Behind, but still falls short of ensuring a quality education to the millions of students of color, students with disabilities, and English-learning students they represent.
The bill "cedes considerable responsibility to states. The hard-learned lesson of the civil rights community over decades has shown that a strong federal role is crucial to protecting the interests of underserved students," said The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of groups, in a letter sent to lawmakers.
Under the bill, there would no longer be federal sanctions for schools labeled as underperforming. However, states would be required to intervene in the nation's lowest-scoring 5 percent of schools, in high school dropout factories and in schools with persistent achievement gaps — something Democrats fought hard to ensure in any bill.
The Senate is expected to vote on the measure next week.
The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the bill that passed the House in July. Officials called the compromise now in play an improvement over the House bill — and a version passed by the Senate. But the administration also stopped short of saying that President Barack Obama would sign it.
No Child Left Behind was signed into law by Bush after passing Congress with broad partisan support. But it quickly became clear that its lofty goals for student achievement were unrealistic. Unions and more liberal voices in the education universe criticized it for placing too much of an emphasis on testing. Among conservatives, the law was assailed for allowing too much federal intrusion in public schools.
The compromise bill, among other things, would:
—Bar the Education Department from mandating or giving states incentives to adopt or maintain any particular set of standards, such as the college and career-ready curriculum guidelines known as Common Core. The standards were created by the states, but have become a lightning rod for those who sought a reduced federal role in education. The administration offered grants through its Race to the Top program for states that adopted strong academic standards for its students.
—End waivers the Obama administration has granted to more than 40 states. These waivers offered exemptions to the more onerous parts of No Child when it became clear the standards set forth there would not be met.
—Would not permit portability — allowing money to follow low-income students to public schools of their choice, an idea embraced by Republicans. Those dollars would remain at struggling schools, under the bill. But it would allow for a small pilot program that would let some federal money move with students in some school districts.
—Encourage testing caps. An amendment from Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, says states should set caps on the total amount of time kids spend taking tests. Bennet says federal testing requirements have resulted in additional layers of state and district level tests, and some of those may be redundant or unnecessary.
CAIRO (AP) —
The Islamic State's gruesome rampage across the Middle East has united the world in horror but left it divided over how to refer to the extremist group, with observers adopting different acronyms based on their translation of an archaic geographical term and the extent to which they want to needle the extremists. Here's a brief explanation of the militant group's various names:
ISIS OR ISIL?
The group traces its roots back to Al-Qaida in Iraq, which declared an Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006. The name never really caught on, however, because the militants were never able to seize and hold significant territory. That began to change when the group expanded into neighboring Syria, exploiting the chaos of its civil war. In 2013, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, renamed it the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, signaling its emergence as a transnational force while sowing the first seeds of confusion over what to call it. Al-Sham is an archaic word for a vaguely defined territory that includes what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan. It is most often translated as either Syria — in the sense of a greater Syria that no longer exists — or as the Levant, the closest English term for the territory it describes. In English, the group therefore came to be known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also ISIS), or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
THE DEROGATORY "DAESH"
Those opposed to the group turned the Arabic acronym corresponding to ISIS into a single word — Daesh — which doesn't mean anything but sounds a little ridiculous. IS' opponents, including public officials like French President Francois Hollande and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, have used the term to mock, condemn or diminish the group. Dawaesh, a plural form of the word that sounds even sillier in Arabic, is widely used in the Middle East. IS bans the use of the term Daesh in areas it controls. But Arabic speakers have found other ways to put down the group. After the IS group's bitter falling out with al-Qaida in 2013, al-Qaida supporters began referring to it as "al-Baghdadi's group," emphasizing their view of him as a renegade. Syrians living under IS rule often refer to it as "al-tanzeem," Arabic for "the organization."
CALL US THE CALIPHATE
When the IS group seized vast parts of northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014, it declared a caliphate in the territories under its control and dropped Iraq and al-Sham from its name. Today the Sunni militant group refers to itself as the Islamic State, or simply The Caliphate. It refers to its affiliates in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere as "provinces." The Associated Press refers to it as the Islamic State group — to distinguish it from an internationally recognized state — or IS for short.