News archive of October 2016

Journalists in Turkey started the week with the early bird news on Oct. 31 that yet another colleague had been taken into police custody after a raid on his house.

One of Istanbul's iconic names, the 115-year-old famous Pandeli Restaurant situated in the Spice Bazaar has been closed for the last three months. 

Restoration works that have been going on for a long time in the Spice Bazaar and the crisis which hit the tourism sector negatively, have removed the oxygen from this famous turquoise-tiled restaurant. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is confident that the Turkish military and its allies in Syria have the capacity to take the town of Al Bab - a stronghold of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - and move on to Manbij to expel fighters attached to the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

According to OECD data, nearly 19 percent of Turkish youth are unemployed. Some 13.3 percent of men aged 15-19, 18.3 percent of men aged 20-24 and 47.6 percent of women aged 20-24 are unemployed, not getting training and not getting an education.

When Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ visited Washington, he made a very good comment on the Gülen community in a meeting at SETA. 

"We never believed it was the decision of the president to shoot down the plane. We know that outside forces were involved with that decision," said Leonid Reshetnikov, the head of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS).

He was speaking on Oct. 31 at a conference organized by the Ankara Policy Center on the future of Turkish-Russian relations.

Istanbul's landmark Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM) on Taksim Square will be demolished and replaced with a new building, Culture and Tourism Minister Nabi Avcı has said about the currently empty edifice, which has been the subject of a tug-of-war over its fate. 

A dozen children between the ages 10 and 12 sit in the small meeting room of a renovated building that houses the Panagia Galatousa Chapel, at the heart of İzmir's Agora, the ancient city center.

Flights were canceled and trees uprooted on Monday in western Crete after it was hit by a violent storm that caused torrential rain and floods in the wider region of Hania, including the villages of Askifou, Sfakia and Falasarna and the Samaria Gorge.

Despite its effort to appear open to dialogue over the way forward after its TV license law was deemed unconstitutional, the government on Monday showed no signs of seeking consensus after it submitted an amendment to Parliament that essentially suspends the right of Minister of State Nikos Pappas to grant nationwide broadcasting rights, rather than meeting the demand of opposition parties to a