Â

Turkey’s leaders are committed to EU membership and still aim to play in the “first division” of Europe despite a bitter row over a crackdown on the media, a top adviser to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has said.
       

There is a small percentage among the most educated, the most equipped people of this country who want to leave, and some of them do actually leave. Because they are the most equipped people of this country, if this country is to develop, it will only develop with them. Their departure is some kind of a punishment for those who stay.

“[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, cross-grained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.”

- Aristophanes, The Knights

A secret tunnel that has been discovered during restoration work under Tokat Castle, Turkey’s second-largest castle in the northern province of Tokat, will be opened to tourism. The tunnel, known as Ceylanyolu, is claimed to have been used by a Roman king’s daughters in order to go to the Pervane bath in the Çanakçı stream area.

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.

The Turkish government has been preparing to make yet another move which would add insult to injury for those who have been concerned over plight of freedom of expression in the country, as a Cabinet member has confirmed they are drafting a bill which would grant the prime minister and the communication minister the ability to block access to certain webpages without a court order if they deem

A 16-year-old student has been arrested for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Central Anatolian province of Konya.

“We had a language which was very suitable for science; yet we slept over it one night and the next morning it was gone. Now we have been dragged down to the level of a country which learns and teaches science in foreign languages. Thousands of words and languages are forgotten. The structure of the language, which used to be suitable for deriving new words and expressions, was curbed.”

Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, does not beat around the bush. “On Syria, Turkey needs to cut and run. Built a wall on its border and turn away,” he said when we talked last month in Istanbul.