The Turkish Daily News reported that yesterday Turkish police arrested 48 people on suspicion of having links to Al-Qaeda.

According to the report, the arrests were the result of a huge security operation covering five provinces and involving hundreds of officers.

Twenty-five people were arrested in the central province of Konya, while the others were detained in Istanbul, neighboring Kocaeli, the western province of İzmir, and Mardin in the southeast.

The paper said that the operation followed the indictment last week of three people, one of them an İzmir lawyer who presented himself as the Al-Qaeda commander in Turkey and was allegedly planning bomb attacks.

Among the buildings raided in Konya was one that was used as a school for children.

The Doğan News Agency said that the planning stage of the operation had taken the Konya police a year and a half, and that 600 police officers in five provinces had taken part in it.

Reports say the operation is expected to be broadened, with more arrests likely.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 30, 2007

The Turkish daily Milliyet reported that the editor of the Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos Hrant Dink has been killed by two shots to the head in front of his office building in Istanbul.

Dink was an outspoken journalist who became known internationally when he was tried for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of Turkey's Penal Code.

The E.U. wants Turkey to abolish this article because it limits freedom of speech.

Dink had recently told the foreign press that he feared for his safety and that it was very difficult for him to live in a country where people hated him. However, he always maintained that Turkey was his country.

Amidst widespread condemnation of the murder in Turkey and in the world, Turkish authorities have started their investigation. It is believed that the attacker was a 19- or 20-year old man seen leaving the scene shouting that he had killed a non-Muslim.

Source: Milliyet, Turkey, January 19, 2007

The Turkish daily Zaman reported today that American actor Sylvester Stallone's possible screen adaptation of a controversial novel on the Armenian genocide has Turks in an uproar.

The U.K. daily Independent reported that the film, based on Austrian author Franz Werfelâ's 1934 novel The Forty Days of Musa Daghâ, has attracted the wrath of the Turkish community in Hollywood.

The Armenian issue has long been a contentious topic in Turkey, which claims the 1915 events were not genocide. The Association for the Struggle Against Armenian Genocide Acknowledgement is attempting to block production of the film.

Source: Zaman, Turkey, January 19, 2007

The Turkish Daily News reported that Turkey's National Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül is expected to meet January 26 with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in Washington, where Turkey and the U.S. will sign a memorandum of understanding formalizing Ankara's participation in the key next phase of the U.S.-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, officials said.

The meeting will be the first talks since Gates took office.

The two are expected to discuss Iraq, efforts to counter the PKK, and other security and defense industry matters.

The Turkish side and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England are due to sign the F-35 memorandum of understanding on Jan. 25, officially making Turkey one of the nine nations taking part in the JSF's production phase.

Turkey plans to buy 100 new-generation F-35s, worth over $10 billion, over the next 20 years. The F-35s are planned to begin to arrive in Turkey around 2014 and should replace the Turkish Air Force's present fleet of older F-16s and Vietnam War-era F-4Es. The U.S. is ordering 2,443 F-35s, and Britain another 138. At this point the nine partners plan to purchase a total of nearly 3,200 planes.

Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense company, is the program's prime contractor. The Turkish TUSAŞ Aerospace Industries and other Turkish companies also will be involved in the F-35s manufacture.

Until recently, the F-35 JSF had been in competition with Europe's Eurofighter Typhoon for the Turkish market, but the military ultimately opted for the U.S.-led option.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 18, 2007

The Turkish daily Hürriyet yesterday covered the murder of Ayça Alkalın, 24, who was found dead in the yard of her family home.

Hürriyet said police suspected that Ayça's murder could be linked to a religious order, following an investigation of her email correspondence and telephone communications. Police said that her email address was "Illuminati."

Police also named as among the prime suspects two men with whom Ayça had exchanged photos online the day before she was killed.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 17, 2007

The Turkish daily Radikal yesterday reported on Turkey's jobless, saying that unemployment was one of Turkey's most urgent problems. According to state statistics, there are currently 2.34 million jobless in Turkey.

State statistics also show that Turkey's unemployment rate dropped to 9.3% in October 2006, from 10.1% in October 2005.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 17, 2007

The Turkish daily Milliyet yesterday featured a report on the 2006 statistics for honor killings in Istanbul. According to the report, there is one honor killing of a woman every two weeks.

The paper cited data from a parliamentary commission according to which Istanbul ranks first in the country in family honor crimes. The report also said that violence against women and children is on the rise in Turkey

The paper added that authorities believed that education was the only way out of violence against women and children. Honor crimes perpetrators were nearly always from eastern or southeast Turkey, the report said.

A lawyer from the Istanbul Governor's Human Rights Chair told Milliyet that the victims were usually women who risked getting caught and being murdered, and ran away from domestic violence, almost always taking their children with them.

In Istanbul, the total number of murders, rapes and beatings of women and children was 3,670, according to police records.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 17, 2007

Abdurahim Karakoç wrote in the Turkish daily Vakit that "attacking the other end of the world and the attacked being Muslims are a special preference for U.S. President George Bush." He added that no U.S. president was "as a mad aggressor as Bush. Bush is definitely a rabid aggressor. He will be biting all Islam nations individually... This is for certain."

He wrote that the U.S. and Israel are "carrying out the worst terrorism, for Bush has gone mad... You can find traces of terrorism in every speech of George Bush."

He added that Bush's "real fight is about making all Muslims in the world toe the line, using terrorism as an excuse... Bush and his cohorts will turn to Christians once they are done with Muslims. Somebody should stop this rabid dog..."

Source: Turkish Daily News, January 15, 2007

In his column in the Turkish daily Hurriyet, columnist Bekir Coskun warns that Turkey and the Turkish people are gradually changing, and that the country now looks more like Saudi Arabia than like Belgium. He lists changes that have taken place in the past week alone:

● Parliamentary commissions have mandated male nurses for male patients in hospitals;

● Prayer rooms in all city ferries and passenger boats;

● New tax breaks and incentives to families with many children;

● Destruction of sculptures depicting females by important artists depicting females destroyed overnight in Izmir and other cities;

● Turkish officials now use Arabic-language greetings;

● Penalization of Turkey's chief inspector, who investigated Saudi terrorism financier Al Qadi; the latter was defended and vouched for by PM Erdogan last year;

● Facilitation of entrance to universities for graduates of the Imam Hatip religious schools, by adding Imam Hatip teachings to the national elementary school education.

Source: Hurriyet, Turkey, January 12, 2007

The Turkish Daily News reported January 12, 2007 that a majority of Turks do not want Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to become president, but still expect him to contend for the presidency in a parliamentary vote in May, according to a poll published in the Aksam daily on January 10.

The poll, by the Metropoll market research company, found that 58% of Turks oppose Erdogan for president, while 34% were in favor. Nearly two-thirds expected Erdoğan to be a candidate when incumbent Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch secularist, retires in May. Erdoğan is expected to announce in April whether he will run.

Turkish secularists fear that Erdoğan, who has roots in political Islam and whose wife wears a headscarf, would try to undermine the separation between state and religion if he became president. The position has traditionally held by secularists. However, Erdoğan's ruling AKP party has a big majority in Parliament.

Source: Turkish Daily News, Turkey, January 11, 2007