News Topic - Turkey

Iran Upbeat On New Us Tie
ANKARA, Turkey - Iran expects weekend talks with the West to lead to the establishment of a US diplomatic outpost in Tehran and the restoration of direct flights between the two nations, the Iranian foreign minister said yesterday. Manouchehr...
New York Post  –  Jul 19, 2008 08:38 AM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: New York: New York

Religion Notes for July 19
Brazos Miracle Outreach Church, 1400 Turkey Creek Road in Bryan, is hosting Veggie Tale Pirates vacation Bible school Monday through Friday from 6 to ...
The Bryan-College Station Eagle  –  Jul 19, 2008 04:05 AM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Texas: Waco-Temple-Bryan

Iran seeking better relations with Washington
ANKARA, Turkey — Iran's foreign minister said Friday that he expects weekend talks with the United States to produce agreements on opening an American diplomatic outpost in Tehran and restoring direct flights between the two nations.Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Iran backs both moves, which he said reflected a mutual "will to do business.”The U.S. State Department spokesman has been pushing for the Bush administration to open an interest section in Tehran similar to one in Havana. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in response to Mottaki's comments that "Washington was always looking for ways to try to reach out to the Iranian people.read more
NewsOK.com  –  Jul 19, 2008 03:24 AM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Oklahoma: Oklahoma City

Iran calls nuclear talks positive
ANKARA, Turkey - Iran's Foreign Minister said Friday that forthcoming nuclear talks in Geneva and the participation of a U.S. diplomat for the first time look positive...
KFDA - NewsChannel 10  –  Jul 19, 2008 01:21 AM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Texas: Amarillo

Fadi Hakura: Turkey turns westwards
Fadi Hakura: If, as is widely expected, the Islamist AKP party is thrown out, an electoral earthquake is possible
The Guardian  –  Jul 18, 2008 11:59 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Politics: Opinions

Was Ahmet Yildiz the victim of Turkey's first gay honour killing?
In a corner of Istanbul today, the man who might be described as Turkey's gay poster boy will be buried – a victim, his friends believe, of the country's deepening friction between an increasingly liberal society and its entrenched conservative traditions.
The Independent  –  Jul 18, 2008 11:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in World

Rebels: Turkey bombs Kurd rebel targets in Iraq
AP - Kurdish rebels say Turkish warplanes have bombed abandoned guerrilla camps in northern Iraq. They say there were no casualties.
Yahoo!  –  Jul 18, 2008 4:20 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in World: Asia

National Wild Turkey Federation to host “Jakes” Canoe event
The National Wild Turkey Federation, along with River Rats Canoe Rentals, is hosting a “Jakes” Canoeing Event Saturday July 26th for children/teens ages 6-17. There is room for 30 children/teens, and parents are welcome to join their child/children in the canoe. The cost is covered by our supporting sponsors, who provide this event at no charge to up to 50 children/teens.
SCnow.com  –  Jul 18, 2008 3:19 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: South Carolina: Myrtle Beach

Facebook: Too Creepy, Childish for the Workplace
News from Portfolio.comAlso on PortfolioEwwww, GoogleFirst Bytes: Yahoo, Google, S.F. Muni-Hacker Update, More...Holy Bottom Line, Batman!Subscribe to Portfolio magazineBill Gates doesn't get a lot of credit these days for being a visionary. But when it comes to his relationship with Facebook, he may still be a step ahead of the rest of us. The Sun, a British tabloid, reported this year that Gates had quit his half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, partly because he was getting more than 8,000 "friend" requests daily but also because he was finding "weird fan sites about him." (View a slideshow of several "weird fan sites.") A Microsoft representative confirms that the boss has gone cold turkey but wouldn't disclose whether Gates knew of a Facebook group called "Would you have sex with Bill Gates for half of his money?" Actually, it's a wonder that Gates was on Facebook in the first place (Microsoft's $240 million investment in it notwithstanding). Bill Gates obviously doesn't need to schmooze on Facebook. And neither do you, despite the pressure you've doubtless felt to join it (because, y’know, everyone is on Facebook). Perhaps you're like Ben Rosen, who co-founded venture-capital fund Sevin Rosen, which has bankrolled such companies as Electronic Arts and Compaq (which he once led as C.E.O.). Rosen is hardly averse to sharing personal information online; he says his blog, BenRosen.com, has become a small social network of sorts. But he has yet to use his Facebook account. "I'm trying to figure out the utility for me," he says. Or perhaps, like Gates, you just find Facebook a little … creepy. Businesspeople often claim to use Facebook for vague "market research" purposes or to satisfy idle curiosity. But the social norms of social networking are still in flux, making privacy a real issue, says internet-marketing writer David Weinberger. "Younger people violate older people's idea of proper behavior when it comes to privacy," he says."It's kind of eerie how much information is available about you on a social network," says Michael Fertik, C.E.O. of online-privacy service ReputationDefender, "and how many conclusions, tentative or otherwise, can be made so handily, fairly or unfairly, based on that information." Fertik estimates that all 55 of his employees use Facebook, and although he doesn't, he's unsettled by the all-consuming, constant-update M.O. it encourages. "I’ve seen a lot of quiet, passive-aggressive resentments and rumors that come from people just knowing that much about your business," he says. "If you're updating people, like, 'I’m at a barbecue at my colleague's house,' someone you work with might ask, 'Why am I not at that barbecue?'"The ease with which Facebook can be used to broadcast your whereabouts adds a particularly disturbing dimension for executives who would surround themselves with security in real life but are lulled into complacency by Facebook's tidy veneer. Last year, the British military sent a directive to its army units to avoid revealing their service connections online—"Be particularly careful if you are on Facebook, MySpace, or Friends Reunited"—fearing that, yes, Al Qaeda could use them to track prey. Your business competitors might not be terrorists per se, but Facebook can be useful for anyone trying to poach your M.V.P.’s.Even social-networking evangelists are legitimately nervous about Facebook, given its fiasco last fall with Beacon, an advertising engine that automatically announced users' activities on other sites—revealing their purchases, for example—without the users' necessarily realizing that their every click was being chronicled. Facebook apologized, but that sort of unwitting dissemination of potentially sensitive information has strengthened the market for Connect Beam, a consultancy that sets up secure social networks for the corporate intranets of Fortune 500 companies. "Companies like Honeywell," says Puneet Gupta, Connect Beam’s C.E.O., "could not take a chance to put their information on someone else's cloud"—meaning on the servers of a social-networking site the company doesn’t control.But Facebook's ick factor in the executive suite might have as much to do with its shiny, happy world of "friendship" as with security. "There's almost an inverse relationship between seriousness and how much you participate in social networking," says ReputationDefender's Fertik, laughing. That basically nails it: Facebook is simply unserious—particularly given how it prompts hard-driving business executives to regress into adolescent vernacular. "Poking" people, requesting "friends," writing on someone’s "wall": It’s cute when you're in high school or college. But in a corporate environment, it sounds disingenuous and downright silly.Ultimately, Facebook candy-coats the true nature of business relationships. And it will rot your teeth.
Wired News  –  Jul 18, 2008 2:30 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Turkey raises overnight borrowing rate as expected
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Turkey's central bank raised its overnight borrowing rate by 50 basis points to 16.75% late Thursday as expected. The bank's "comment that it will consider a further measured rate hike when needed, and that the current level of the policy rate is supportive of disinflation, suggests that further monetary tightening is not a given moving forward, but we retain our forecast for one final 25 basis points August hike," said analysts at RBC Capital Markets. The Turkish currency, the lira, rose 0.6% against the U.S. dollar and 0.9% against the euro. In Istanbul, the IMKB-100 stock index rose 1.1% in intraday trading on Friday. Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
MarketWatch.com  –  Jul 18, 2008 1:40 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Business: Markets