
Peace Islands Institute and Kimse Yok Mu held a panel discussion on “Micro-Finance and Vocational Training For Empowerment of Women” on the occasion of the 59th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Mehmet Kilic, Director of Peace Islands Institute’s Center for Global Affairs, served as moderator for a panel of speakers from diverse backgrounds and experience in humanitarian relief, pharmaceutical, and politics.

Ahmet Altan, the former editor-in-chief of the Taraf daily, has said that the Gülen movement acted “courageously” during the public revelations of the Dec. 17, 2013 corruption scandal that implicated several senior members of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.

In the latest example of the Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) “parallel” paranoia, the ruling party’s Sinop deputy and head of the Parliamentary Interior Affairs Commission, Mehmet Ersoy, ordered restaurant officials in Parliament to remove a dish called “samanyolu kebap” as it reminds him of institutions affiliated with the “parallel structure,” a daily reported on Monday.

Everywhere in Turkey, people are talking about the clampdown on the Turkish media. The situation is quite dire. At Samanyolu, a TV station, has 14 broadcast channels in Turkey, English, Arabic and Kurdish and dozens of radio stations and popular news portals. Foreign news chief, Adnan Tokkapi, said its general manager, Hidayet Karaca, has been held in prison without conviction since December 2014.

Embrace Relief and White Tulip Health Foundation organized a health screening at an orphanage in Haiti. Five volunteer doctors from Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey donated their time by traveling to Haiti and providing both orphanage residents and nonresidents with basic health screenings.

Jafar Gwani, an Islamic theologian based in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, has said the ideas of Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in the US, are the best antidote in the fight against the ideology of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

In yet another government-backed operation targeting the Gülen movement (Hizmet movement), four tax inspectors from the Finance Ministry and a number of police officers conducted a raid on Saturday at a private school affiliated with the movement in the southern province of Adana, leading to protests from parents of the school’s students.

In yet another government-backed operation targeting the Gülen movement, tax inspectors from the Finance Ministry on Saturday carried out a raid with police at a private school opened by volunteers of the movement in southern province of Adana.

The raid came just two days after Turkey’s Student Selection and Placement Center (ÖSYM) announced the results of the Higher Education Entrance Examination (YGS), which revealed that students from Gülen-inspired schools are among the top scorers of the exam, casting doubt on the objectivity of the raid.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s unrelenting denunciation of schools affiliated with the Gülen community and calls for the closure of the schools over the past two years have been harshly criticized in the central African country of Cameroon.