GOOGLE is seeking to put every news article written in the past 200 years online. The company will pay for scanning the articles – estimated to run into billions worldwide – and will make money from advertising placed next to the pages. It follows the success of Google Book Search, which makes scanned copies of old and out-of-print books available on the internet.
Source: METRO, 10 Semptember 2008
![Scholar given national grant award [ATATURK]](https://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/washington-dc-g467c50bfe_1920.jpg "Scholar given national grant award [ATATURK] 2")
Sept. 10, 2008
By Jacqueline Deavenport
Reporter
A member of the history department will be conducting research in Turkey this year, thanks to a Fulbright grant.
Dr. George W. Gawrych, an associate professor, was awarded a Fulbright Senior Researcher Scholar grant and will begin his research Sept. 15, said Jamie Lawrence, a Public Affairs Officer in the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
“It is a tremendous honor for me to receive this grant,” Gawrych said in a press release. “I distinctly remember growing up with a great admiration for Senator Fulbright. He was one of my heroes in the political world, and I am thrilled to have this opportunity of working with scholars in Turkey while conducting the ten months of focused research.”
Gawrych said he remembers being inspired in junior high school by Arkansas Sen. William James Fulbright, a man committed to finding peace and understanding between nations through education.
Considerations such as professional qualifications, lecturing activity, research activity, language proficiency, and experience abroad, determine who is awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. The Fulbright program was created in 1946, and there are several different types of Fulbright programs for students and educators. Gawrych is the fifth Baylor professor to receive a Fulbright award, according to the press release.
His research will focus on one of Turkey’s political historical figures, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is trying to understand Ataturk’s career as both a military commander and a statesman. “There is this larger vision, higher purpose that drives him,” said Gawrych.
Ataturk was an army commander and a revolutionary who led the Turkish national movement, which, in turn, became the Turkish War of Independence. As a statesman, he instituted political, cultural and economic reforms.
For 19 years, Gawrych taught at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at The United States Military Academy at West Point, where he first became interested in the subject of his research.
Upon coming to Baylor, he had an opportunity to focus on sources associated with Ataturk.
For nine months, Gawrych will be pouring over primary sources, working primarily in archives, libraries and research institutes in Ankara and Istanbul. He will also be visiting important battle sites.
Gawrych said his biggest challenges will be sifting through the masses of documentation and deciphering hand-written and short-hand written documents.
Dr. Jeffrey Hamilton, department chair of the history department, said Gawrych will help bring positive attention to Baylor.
“We’re very pleased for Dr. Gawrych and Baylor, because the Fulbright Research fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards that an academic can receive,” he said. “While both faculty and staff will miss Dr. Gawrych, his presence in Turkey will raise the profile of Baylor as a whole and in Middle East studies.”
Gawrych’s wife, Joan, will be accompanying him on his trip to Turkey, and there they will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary.
Source: www.baylor.edu,
Syed Hamad Ali
Published 10 September 2008
Ankara’s man in London explains why his country’s place is at the heart of Europe and how after all that talk of Turkish roots Boris still hasn’t found time to meet him
Did you know Boris Johnson’s great grandfather was a liberal Turkish journalist called Ali Kemal alive during the dying days of the Ottoman empire? Well of course you did. London’s new Tory mayor banged on about his roots a fair bit during this year’s election campaign.
But the centuries old ties between Turkey and the UK go much deeper than Johnson’s ancestry. Just ask Turkey’s ambassador to the UK, Mehmet Yiğit Alpogan: “Turkey’s membership of the European Union is one of the projects that the Turkish public opinion pay attention to and in that respect the support that Great Britain gives to Turkey is very much welcomed and appreciated.”
So has he actually met Johnson? “I am waiting for that appointment to happen,” says Alpogan, who seemed just a tiny bit disappointed a request to London’s mayor has yet to be taken up.
“I know that he is a very busy person and it will be my pleasure to be able to meet him, get together with him, and talk about many things including this past life.” A suitably diplomatic take on the whole matter.
But if he does feel let down Alpogan can perhaps take some heart from the UK government’s strong support of Turkey’s aspiration to join the European Union. An attitude which contrasts sharply with the more reserved reaction of some of the other EU states such as France and Austria.
“Turkey’s place is in Europe,” says Alpogan. “There is no question about this.” And the current UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, agrees. In a Telegraph article last year he expressed his approval of Turkey’s accession, highlighting among others the pressing energy benefits: “Turkey is an increasingly important transit route for oil and natural gas, with 10 per cent of the world’s oil flowing through the Bosporus.”
The Foreign Secretary’s predecessor, Jack Straw, had gone even further and had equated membership as a means towards deflecting a “clash of civilisations”.
Boris Johnson, too, has spoken in favour of Turkey’s accession to the EU. “We would be crazy to reject Turkey,” wrote Boris Johnson in his book ‘The Dream of Rome’, “which is not only the former heartland of the Roman empire but also, I see, one of the leading suppliers of British fridges.”
Indeed the UK is the second largest export market for Turkey. For the UK investor also, Turkey is important.
Yet the question of Turkey’s EU membership is controversial. Polls indicate many citizens across Europe do not approve the move.
The situation is not helped by opposition from French President Nicholas Sarkozy and his alternative offers of a Mediterranean Union or a referendum over EU accession.
“If the Europeans say that European Union is a Christian club they are thereby making a discrimination,” says Alpogan. “They are committing a grave mistake. Of course Turkey wouldn’t have a place in such a European Union. But I don’t think that the European public opinion thinks this way … we hope that this understanding will continue to prevail and the European Union will be a place where the alliance of civilisations will be represented.”
One of the apparent reasons citizens of European states fear Turkish membership of the EU is the prospect of mass immigration.
The ambassador points, however, towards other countries in Europe whose migrants returned to their home countries sometime after joining the EU, such as the Spanish, Greeks and now the Polish.
“For a short while it might be true,” admits Alpogan. “But with the investment, economic activity and other developments that come with EU membership, soon these people would go back – at least that is what the history of the European Union shows us and that is how it is proven.”
Maybe, but that argument may fall on deaf ears in a Europe already brimming with debates over whether immigration has gone too far in this corner of the globe.
Yet there is one more twist to this whole accession debate. Who is to gain more from this membership, Europe or Turkey? A quick look at Turkey on the world’s map shows just why this nation of 80 million is considered so crucial. Yes it is about trade and access to energy but it is also about regional influence.
Turkey is the bridge between Europe and Asia.
And the ambassador is quick to highlight the “geo-strategic” and “geographical” benefits that lie in store for the European Union were Turkey to become a member.
Then there’s Turkey’s relationship with Central Asian, through a shared Turkic cultural and linguistic heritage with many of those countries, may potentially prove to be the most useful one for Europe in the future given the region being a major fuel reserve for the world.
But, of course, most European visitors to Turkey go there for one purpose – their holidays.
According to the ambassador two million British tourists head to Turkey each year and the figures are on the rise at the rate of 10-20 percent. “We have already 20,000 British families who have come and settled in Turkey or have a second home in Turkey,” says Alpogan. “Of course we are very glad to have them there and they are another strong link between the two countries.”
Indeed although he may not have found the time to meet with the Turkish ambassador, Boris Johnson, just a fortnight after winning the election for mayor in May, disappeared off to the south western coast of Turkey for a break with his family.
The trip did not go un-noticed by the local media, with the Turkish Daily News reporting that the London mayor’s ancestral ties with their country and Islam would “hopefully be beneficial for Turkey and certainly his choice of holiday destination can only be seen as advantageous for Turkish tourism.”
Perhaps. Although it may be that it has the reverse effect. Only time will tell.
Source: www.newstatesman.com, 10 September 2008
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Turkey’s economic growth slowed down sharply in the second quarter of the year. GDP growth fell to 1.9% year-on-year in the second quarter, down from 6.7% in the first quarter, the Turkish Statistical Institute reported Wednesday. The figure was well below market expectations of 3.7%. “The slowdown in the economy is relatively broad-based with consumers and investors suffering from the lagged impact of higher inflation and the global credit crunch, while exporters are suffering from the slowdown in the global economy,” said Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank, in a research note. In Istanbul, the IMKB-100 stock index fell 2.1% in intraday trading.
Turkey’s economic growth falls sharply in second quarter – MarketWatch.
HOW could we not visit Troy?
Sarah Collins for The New York Times
An international archaeological dig is exploring nine different cities in the Truva ruins, where tourists can see mysteries such as these stone foundations. It was a question that bedeviled us as we planned our first Turkish odyssey. Troy was nothing less than the storied destination for the armada of fast, trim ships that crossed the blind poet’s wine-dark sea. The place where the anger of Achilles drove him to slay Hector before dragging him about the palace walls. The very ground where the fleet-footed Achaeans plundered the hallowed towers of Ilium and reclaimed Helen of Sparta.
Or maybe not.
Archaeologists are still debating Troy’s very existence. Beyond this, some guidebooks — and several friends who had been to the Anatolian town of Truva at the supposed site of Troy — presented a disappointing, nay muddled, picture of what might await us.
Explorer – Truva, Turkey – Searching for an Epic’s Origins – NYTimes.com.
By Firat Kayakiran and Ben Holland
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) — Turkey’s biggest media owner Aydin Dogan attacked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for seeking to silence the press, and said he’s willing to seek legal redress if his company’s expansion plans are blocked after a row with the government.
“This administration is very oppressive, they don’t like pluralism,” Dogan, 72, said in an interview at his company’s headquarters in Istanbul last night. “Nobody can take from me what’s rightfully mine. I’d go to court.”
Erdogan on Sept. 7 accused Dogan of a smear campaign against his Justice and Development Party. Shares in Dogan companies sank the next day on concern the group’s projects, which include acquisition of state companies and applications to build an oil refinery with OMV AG and obtain a terrestrial license for news channel CNN Turk, may be hurt by the dispute.
Dogan said his energy unit Petrol Ofisi AS, co-owned with OMV, will pursue its plan to build a refinery at Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast, where oil arrives by pipeline from Azerbaijan. He said he “reserves the right” to apply to courts if regulators, who haven’t awarded a permit for the project, continue to block it.
Bloomberg.com: Europe.
