Anadolu Agency

Turkey’s long-awaited 8.6 billion Turkish Lira ($4.1 billion) high-speed train link between Istanbul and Ankara has begun operating from Istanbul’s Pendik station.

Turkey has been doing its best to reach out to Iraqi Turkmens caught in the middle of sectarian strife in neighboring Iraq, the head of a government aid agency has said, in an apparent response to criticism that the government has been ignoring the plight of Turkmens.

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli has issued a warning particularly addressed to Kurdish citizens, asking them not be deceived by a “plot aiming to annul the Lausanne Treaty,” referring to the historic treaty that is widely acclaimed as the basis of the independence and unitary structure of the Turkish state.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has filed separate complaints to both the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office and to Turkey’s top judicial body against Prosecutor Zekeriya Öz, on charges of “insult, slandering and threatening.”

One of the three presidential hopefuls, Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş, has started publicizing all donations received by his campaign.

The Turkish government claims that the Kürecik radar base is not designed to protect Israel, while the opposition loudly insists it is.

Torrential rain has caused flash flooding in Istanbul since early July 19, prompting road closures and disrupting life across parts of the city.
      
Okmeydanı, Levent, Başakşehir, Arnavutköy and Sultangazi districts were among the most affected areas, where floods made some roads impassable and submerged work places, Anadolu Agency (AA) reported.

Experts have said the U.K. may take a step toward hydraulic fracking to extract shale gas, given the high economic cost of subsidizing renewable energy, as the new Cabinet also signals such a tendency.

The U.K.’s new energy and environment ministers have bluntly said they oppose renewable energy and favor hydraulic fracking for extracting shale gas instead.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court has ruled that the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was not efficiently probed and the rights of his family were therefore violated.

A Syrian guide of Turkey’s Anadolu Agency was killed on July 16 in a rocket attack, the state-run agency has reported.

Ahmed abu Rasha was killed as the team drove toward Museyir, an Aleppo district controlled by rebels, to cover a bombing incident.