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The tomcat... did not have an easy life. "The cat suffered several broken bones during its lifetime," says Haruda. And yet, based on a very conservative estimate, the animal had most likely made it past its first year of life. For Haruda and her colleagues, this is a clear indication that people had taken care of this cat. During a research stay in Kazakhstan, the scientist examined the findings of an excavation in Dzhankent, an early medieval settlement in the south of the country which had been mainly populated by the Oghuz, a pastoralist Turkic tribe. There she discovered a...

Armenian patriarch surprisingly backs President ErdoÄŸanÂ’s position, asking also for Christian prayer at famous former church. After 85 years as a museum, the Hagia Sophia is poised to once again become a mosque. Might it also again become a church? A Turkish court is scheduled to rule on July 2 if the iconic Byzantine basilica can be opened for Muslim worship. Built in 537 by Emperor Justinian, in 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Five centuries later, the secularizing founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, turned it into a museum. UNESCO designated the...

Turkey says it is deploying 1,000 police officers to its land border with Greece to halt the pushback of migrants into Turkey. Thousands of migrants and refugees, desperate to get into the EU, remain in the border zone. Greek guards have fired tear gas to stop them entering. The extra Turkish police are going to the Meric river (called Evros in Greek) on the border, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said. The EU has condemned Turkey's policy. The Greek government says that since early Saturday its forces have prevented the illegal entry of 34,778 people and arrested 244. Syrians, Afghans, Pakistanis...

A large Turkish military convoy rumbled into rebel-held areas of northwest Syria on Sunday, witnesses on the ground and activists said. Separately, airstrikes on a rebel-held village in Syria’s northwest killed at least seven people, opposition activists said. Elsewhere, rebel shelling killed a woman and wounded at least three journalists, Syrian state TV reported. The violence and troop movements came amid a Syrian government offensive into the country’s last rebel stronghold, located in Idlib province and parts of the nearby Aleppo region. Turkish troops are deployed in some of those rebel-held areas to monitor a cease-fire that has since collapsed....

A day after local elections, a mayor-elect from the opposition Felicity Party (SP) was physically assaulted by the former mayor of Diyarbakır’s Çüngüş district, a ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) politician, the T24 news website reported. SP mayor-elect Ali Suat Akmeşe was injured along with another party member and a policeman. They were airlifted to a hospital in Diyarbakır. According to a local SP official, the injured party member is in critical condition. “The AKP chairman [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan], ministers and [AKP ally] Devlet Bahçeli terrorized the society with their political messages and sowed the seeds of anger,” he...

Australia’s prime minister said he would summon Turkey’s ambassador in Canberra on Wednesday to explain “very offensive” comments made by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, AFP reported. Erdoğan, while campaigning for local elections, presented the attack as part of an assault on Turkey and Islam and that warned anti-Muslim Australians would suffer the same fate as soldiers at Gallipoli, a blood-drenched World War I battle.“I find it a very offensive comment, of course I do, and I will be calling in the Turkish ambassador today to meet with me to discuss these issues,” Scott...

UTRECHT, Netherlands - A shooting on a Dutch tram left several people injured in Utrecht, multiple news outlets are reporting.

Secret Turkish intelligence documents obtained by Nordic Monitor have revealed the extent of pervasive profiling of unsuspecting citizens in Turkey and how irrelevant, incredibly vague and unspecified information led to the prosecution of tens of thousands of legitimate government critics and opponents.In a letter sent to the Istanbul 29th High Criminal Court on Sept. 26, 2017, classified as secret by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), legal counsellor Ümit Ulvi Canik attached the intelligence notes kept by the agency on 31 defendants who were facing trial on charges of alleged terrorism. Canik signed the letter on behalf of intelligence chief Hakan Fidan.The 10-page classified document...

Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany's intelligence community. Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society. The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by...

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Turkish authorities to guarantee the safety of journalists during their military operations after shots fired by Turkish soldiers injured two Syrian Kurdish journalists in the border town of Tal Abyad, in northeastern Syria, on 2 November. Ibrahim Ahmad and Gulistan Mohammed, who work for the Syrian Kurdish news agency ANHA/Hawa, sustained gunshot injuries while covering the clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces and the Turkish army’s cross-border bombardment of the town.  The condition of Ahmad, who was hit in the leg, is stable, but Mohammed’s condition is much more worrying because the bullet struck her in the face....

Two years ago, eleven HDP deputies were arrested in Turkey. After two years of imprisonment, the European Court of Human Rights is now to decide. On 4 November, eleven deputies of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were arrested in Turkey. In the middle of the night, party leaders Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, as well as Nursel Aydoğan, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, Selma Irmak, Ziya Pir, Ferhat Encü, Gülser Yıldırım, İdris Baluken, Leyla Birlik and İmam Taşçıer were brought out of their homes. While Sırrı Süreyya Önder, Ziya Pir and İmam Taşçıer were later released against mandatory reporting, others were remanded...

Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Iraqi authorities have deprived Turkish soldiers, deployed in northern Iraq to combat Kurdish militias, from visas to return to their bases as means to cut down the number of troops which Baghdad had repeatedly demanded to pull out. Watheq al-Hashemi, director of al-Nahrain Center for Strategic Studies, an Iraqi government-affiliated think tank, told Almaalomah website that the Iraqi government has unilaterally decided not to grant Turkish soldiers on leave at their homeland visas to return to the Turkish military base in Bashiqa region, north of Iraq. According to Hashemi, the measure, adopted over the past months, has helped...

Medeni Duran wrote that his imprisoned brother Metin "cannot walk, speak, or eat and does not recognize anyone anymore. He can only breathe." Mistreatment and even torture of journalists and media employees, along with arbitrary arrests, are getting alarmingly commonplace in Turkey. At least 183 journalists and media workers in Turkey in are being held, either in pretrial detention or serving a prison sentence, according to the Platform for Independent Journalism. Dissident journalists and writers in Turkey increasingly face government threats and arbitrary arrests for their work and opinions, but for Metin Duran, the punishments have been even more...

The Turkish lira has collapsed to an all-time low against the dollar, but the country's leader has brushed aside concerns, telling Turks "we have our God." The Turkish President Recep Erdogan then followed those comments up Friday by urging Turks to sell dollars and gold and buy lira. At around 8:00 a.m. ET Friday, the lira had fallen to $7.081, an almost 11 percent loss for the session. It has since pared some losses. As recently as April one dollar bought about four Turkish lira.

Turkish residents and citizens of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands who overwhelming voted for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took to the streets to celebrate his victory. The Islamist President saw overwhelming support in several Western European countries, according to a poll showing the votes of Turkish citizens living abroad reported by Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. The data shows that in Belgium 74.9 percent of Turks voted for Erdoğan, which was similar in neighbouring Holland with 73 percent and in Austria with 72.3 percent.

The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office has issued arrest warrants against two Turkish diplomats. The diplomats linked to the Turkish domestic intelligence service MIT are accused of planning to kidnap a businessman. The Swiss federal prosecutor's office has issued arrest warrants against Turkish diplomats Haci Mehmet Gani and Hakan Kamil Yerge. The diplomats are accused of having planned to kidnap a businessman in the late summer of 2016. The Zurich businessman with Turkish roots is said to be a married family man in his mid-fifties. The businessman was advised by the diplomats because he belonged to the movement of the Islamic...

Austria’s conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced that his country will deport the imams financed by foreign countries and close 7 mosques. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced that the country will be deporting 60 imams and their families with ties to Turkey as part of the “fight against political Islam”. Kurz said 7 mosques will also be closed and that this decision has been taken particularly in relation with children dressed in military uniforms to reenact an Ottoman era war in Turkish mosques. The Chancellor held a press conference and said, “Paralle societies, political Islam and radicalization have no place in...

Turkey’s lira weakened beyond the psychologically important level of 4.0 to the US dollar yesterday, bringing it close to a record low, as concerns about double-digit inflation, and politics, continued to weigh on sentiment.

Turkish identification papers have been found on the terrorist who was reportedly eliminated by security forces after he stabbed a security guard on Hagai Street in Jerusalem's Old City. .....

A Turkish prosecutor is demanding a life sentence for American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been detained since Oct. 7, 2016 over his alleged links with an armed terrorist organization.Brunson, who has formally led Izmir Resurrection Church for over 22 years, has been charged with being a "member and executive of the terrorist group" accused of being behind the failed coup attempt in Turkey last year.According to Al-Monitor, Turkey has blamed U.S.-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen for the coup attempt, and the government has been demanding his extradition.However, the U.S. has refused to hand over the cleric, who is now...