Before 1915 there used to be around four thousand operating churches in Western Armenia, of which only 44 in Istanbul and 6 in Anatolia now operate underneath the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. All the rest were either destroyed or converted into mosques, warehouses, sheds. Most of the churches are simply ruined, and they can be recognized only by the few extant photographs. And U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone, appointed by Barack Obama during the Congressional recess, cannot but know all of this.

Pro-PKK RojTV had claimed last week that Turkish military had struck a civilian vehicle during its bombing of PKK hideouts.

One security source in Abuja said he suspected an attack either by Boko Haram, a Nigerian radical Islamist sect.