News archive of November 2016

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.