Vowel letters

Omicron might be making itself look “more human”

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree to change the Kazakh language from Cyrillic to Latin, the head of state said today. "There is a Latin script on the alphabet of the Kazakh language," he says. The government has been planning to set up a commission to draw up a schedule for moving to Latin from 2025. Control will be exercised by the administration of the president.

The Serbian government is planning to set up a Council for the Serbian Language and introduce fines for public institutions and companies that do not use Cyrillic, as well as tax benefits to promote wider use of the script, state-owned newspaper Vecernje Novosti reported on Monday. 

Tens of thousands of people came together to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Sarıkamış operation, during which around ten thousand Turkish soldiers froze to death in the northeastern part of the country during World War I.

The vigil against the privatization of the protected beach of Ä°ztuzu on the Mediterranean will enter its second week beginning on Jan. 6, with activists relying on each other to prevent the transfer of the right to run the recreational facilities at the site to the new holders.

The municipality of Cizre, the southeastern town in the province of Şırnak that recently witnessed deadly unrest, has begun closing ditches dug by the youth branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The ditches had been dug in a bid to prevent the security forces enter particular neighborhoods.

A Cameroonian refugee that recently gave birth in captivity died late Dec. 30 at a processing center in Ä°zmir after being forced to reside in difficult conditions despite serious health issues, according to lawyers.

Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has joined the commemoration of the 34 villagers who lost their lives in a Turkish military airstrike in 2011 in the southeastern province of Şırnak, calling on the government find those responsible for the deaths.

An indictment on a traffic accident in which a Lebanese-American reporter was killed near Turkey’s border with Syria has been completed, with the prosecutor demanding the driver of a heavy vehicle be sentenced to between two to six years in prison on manslaughter charges.

Turkey’s Ambassador to the United States Serdar Kılıç has penned a letter to U.S. daily The Washington Post to slam an article that criticized recent media operations in Turkey as a threat to democracy.