NEWS

Cumhuriyet newspaper staff and writers have published a declaration in reaction to President Tayyip Erdoğan’s words, “This newspaper too is now part of the spying scheme. The person who wrote this report will pay dearly for it, he won’t get away with it so easily,” targeting their Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar after their newspaper published a report on a delivery of Syria-bound arms in MİT [National Intelligence Service] trucks.

I should have guessed we had to walk a kilometer once I heard an attendant repeat every five seconds, “The rally venue is 100 metres ahead, on the left”. You would think we were re-conquering the city, as we walked on and on but felt like we were in the same place. In the meantime, I observed the middle-aged men, whose commercial acumen I greatly admired, selling scarves, caps, sandwiches, bottled water, flags and plaques.

The 212 million dollar Akbank loan for SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijani Republic, for the container port project in Aliağa, İzmir, was approved on May 25. The project land was transferred to SOCAR with a ‘preferential’ clause added to the omnibus bill.

100 years later, we would have loved to think that certain things have changed in these lands; however, we can’t. It is not easy to tolerate seeing what people will do for power, and how the smile on a face can, in a flash, change into an evil grin; but we will.

Prime Minister Davutoğlu, in a television interview, implying HDP co-President Selahattin Demirtaş, said, “I wonder what bargains he has made that led him to sabotage the Solution Process upon his return to Turkey, I wonder what bargains he has made that he is acting in tandem with the Armenian Diaspora that claims a right over the lands on which the Solution Process focuses”. Yet it was only three months ago that the same Prime Minister had said, “The Diaspora is our Diaspora”.

Interior Ministry permission has been imposed on any academic research on Syrian refugees to be carried out at universities. The Higher Education Council (YÖK) decision was taken upon the request of the Migration Administration Department of the Interior Ministry.

The Greek Parliament has passed a law that will pave the way for the construction of a mosque in Athens. This was among the conditions required by Ankara for the opening of the Theological School of Halki in the framework of reciprocity. Ankara is now expected to take a step regarding the seminary.

HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş spoke at a rally in Mersin that went ahead in defiance of the synchronized bomb attacks on his party’s bureaus in Mersin and Adana: ‘We will approach other political parties with feelings of fraternity in order to render this provocation void’

The People’s Democratic Party (HDP) had condemned the bomb attacks on its party bureaus in Adana and Mersin with a written statement: “Dark forces supported by the government want to prevent the progress and election work of our party”

The findings of the CRRC-Armenia/TESEV joint survey on public perception in Armenia on the normalization of Turkey-Armenia relations have been published. According to the survey, issues of trust regarding normalization persist, however, especeially the opening of the border and economic relations may constitute an important step in normalization.