Turkey (Ahlul Bayt News Agency) – Istanbul, will host the 10th session of the World Association of the Scientific Miracles in the Quran and Sunnah.
The session will be held from March 11-14, 2011, Moheet website reported.
According to the association’s secretary general Dr Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Musleh, the session’s theme would be the effects of Quran’s scientific miracles on human thought. It will be held in cooperation with the Center for Islamic Studies.
Mr. Al Musleh said that the participants will also discuss the Quran and Sunnah’s scientific miracles in different fields including biology, astronomy, space sciences, geology, marine sciences, humanities and law.
Different scientific committees have been set up to best organize the meeting in March, he went on to say.
Turkish State Minister Zafer Caglayan and Turkmen vice presidents also signed an agreement envisaging cooperation between science academies of the two countries.
Friday, 12 November 2010 16:21
The Turkish president said on Friday that his current visit to Turkmenistan confirmed one more time the will and determination to improve Turkey’s ties with this country.
Speaking at a joint press conference with his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow in Turkmenbashi, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Turkmenistan had developed remarkably since his last visit to the country two years ago.
Noting that numerous important matters had been on the agenda of his talks in Turkmenistan, Gul said the two countries had carried out successful activities in development, construction, industry and energy projects so far, adding cooperation opportunities for near future had been discussed during his latest meetings.
“We have also discussed the things we can do to carry our common culture and historical heritage to future generations,” Gul said.
“We have one more time confirmed our will to improve our relations in every area,” the president added.
Turkmen President Berdimuhamedow also said that Gul’s visit provided the opportunity for a fruitful exchange of views on matters concerning both countries.
Describing Turkey as a major and strategic commercial and economic partner, Berdimuhamedow said Turkey and Turkmenistan had common cultural and historical values for centuries.
The Turkmen president noted that cultural activities to be organized at international level would help Turkey and Turkmenistan get closer.
As part of Gul’s visit to Turkmenistan, Turkish State Minister Zafer Caglayan and Turkmen vice presidents also signed an agreement envisaging cooperation between science academies of the two countries.
The M.I.T. Enterprise Forum, a volunteer-based entrepreneurship organization founded as an initiative by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, has opened its ninth global office in Turkey.
FOUNDATION: The founders of M.I.T. Enterprise Forum Turkey pose at the opening ceremony of the organization.
The organization aims to become the most influential global entrepreneurial network by building a platform for networking, knowledge sharing and wealth creation for entrepreneurs worldwide, Richard Kivel, global president of the M.I.T. Enterprise Forum, said at the opening ceremony on Monday in Istanbul.
“We are focused on supporting the passion and creativity that every entrepreneur feels inside,” he said.
The Turkey branch will support young entrepreneurs who make a difference with new ideas, said Gülsün Bozkurt, president for the M.I.T. Enterprise Forum Turkey. “A distinguishing property of M.I.T. Enterprise Forum is that it is an organization of volunteers,” said Bozkurt, who is also an MIT graduate.
The organization has more than 900 volunteers globally, Kivel said. More than 88,000 people attended over 400 events organized by the Enterprise Forum last year, the president said.
The founding members of the M.I.T. Enterprise Forum Turkey hail from various professions such as antiques, information technologies and banking. They include Selçuk Kiper, Çağlan Kuyumcu, Burçin Ergünt, Tayfun Demirören, Atom Damalı and Volkan Ekinci.
Business Plan Competition
The first activity of the Forum will be a Business Plan Competition, with a total prize purse of $70,000.
Groups of three with at least two Turkish members will attend the three-phase competition with their business ideas, said Bülent Hiçsönmez, an M.I.T. Enterprise Forum Turkey board member and Google Turkey director.
The applications will be accepted until Feb. 1, he said. On March 1 the jury will make a shortlist of 30 nominees.
Nine groups will be named on May 3 and will cooperate with professionals such as lawyers and accountants that the Enterprise Forum provides to develop their plans, Hiçsönmez said.
Investors might be interested in business ideas by not only the winners but all attendees, said Ali Haydar Bozkurt, Toyota Turkey CEO, which is sponsoring the competition.
“There is a misunderstanding that entrepreneurs need investors,” said Bozkurt, at his speech at the ceremony. “But the truth is just the opposite. It is the investors looking for young and bright ideas.”
Along with the competition, the forum plans to organize several events including entrepreneurial workshops, a local conference and case studies. These events will provide chance for young entrepreneurs to develop networking with other institutions of MIT.
Turkey’s leading mobile telecommunication company, Turkcell, is also a sponsor of the organization.
Detailed information on the competition can be found at www.mitefturkey.org
Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, one of the sites the Stuxnet computer worm may have been aimed at. Photo / AP
Did they or didn’t they? Was the Stuxnet computer worm the work of an Israeli cyberwarfare team or of some other government wanting to implicate Israel?
The answer, says United States security specialist Bruce Schneier, writing on Forbes.com, is unlikely ever to be known.
Certainly, the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported last week that Israel wasn’t admitting to having created the worm. But the paper pointed out that the country has the capability – within Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defence Force – to do so.
And it quotes the head of the IDF’s intelligence branch, Major General Amos Yadlin, saying last year that “cyber will be the new battlefield” of war. Israeli Defence had over the past year “formalised its cyber efforts”, the paper said.
Stuxnet is such a sophisticated piece of software that there’s little dispute it’s the work of a national government, says Sydney-based Steve Martin of antivirus software company Symantec.
“The theory is, it looks like it’s government-based rather than from a private entity or criminals, and that probably narrows down the field somewhat,” he says.
But like Schneier, he believes the many law enforcement and intelligence agencies that will be trying to trace Stuxnet’s source have little chance of success.
“They want to find its origins, but more, they want to understand the strategy, because this really is the type of malicious code that is ideal for cyberwarfare. If I was a country intent on invading another, before I did that it would be pretty powerful to disrupt their electricity grid or water supplies or other services.”
The finger keeps pointing at Israel because the main victim of Stuxnet, which first surfaced in June, was Iran. The worm, which targets a particular type of industrial control system from German company Siemens, appears to have disrupted Iran’s fledgling nuclear industry, a flashpoint for tension particularly with Israel and the US.
Fuelling the speculation that Israel is responsible are clues in the Stuxnet code itself. The worm records a value of”19790509″ in the Windows registry, or settings database, of infected computers. The digits can be read as the date in 1979 when Iran executed Persian Jew Habib Elghanain for spying for Israel.
Elsewhere in the code can be found the word “myrtus”, which could mean the myrtle plant. The Hebrew word for myrtle is hadassah; Queen Esther, who in the fourth century BC saved Persian Jews from genocide, was named Hadassah.
Equally, myrtus might mean “my RTUs”, where RTU stands for remote terminal unit, an industrial control system component.
But obvious markers of Israeli authorship of the worm could be intended to throw investigators off the scent, Martin says.
“That could well be in there to confuse those trying to track down the source, which is a highly likely tactic for whoever has written the code.”
Or Israel might have wanted it to look as though it was being framed.
If it was the work of Israel, Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote last weekend, it showed the country was maintaining a technological edge over its enemies, which was “a great relief”.
Symantec estimates up to 10 programmers would have taken six months to write Stuxnet, clearly making it a government-sponsored – albeit illegal – effort.
The worm relies on five “zero-day exploits” – hitherto unknown security vulnerabilities – to infect Windows computers, en route to the industrial controllers that are its target. Martin says zero-day exploits are a rare commodity.
“To put that into perspective, in 2009 a total of 12 zero-day threats were identified.”
Symantec is less interested in Stuxnet’s origins than in preventing its spread. As far as Martin is aware, no New Zealand or Australian organisation has suffered damage from it. “The clear advice to organisations with industrial control systems is, first, make sure your security software is up to date on your PC network, and that you’ve scanned for this particular worm.”
Typically industrial control systems only come in contact with an organisation’s PC network through the intermediary of a USB memory stick, which might be used to transfer a software update.
“This is the single biggest threat we have seen and it has the potential for causing catastrophic consequences,” Martin says. “One would imagine that if I could turn off a cooling system in a nuclear plant, and also turn off the alarm that it was overheating, that I could get some sort of meltdown. This code absolutely has the potential to do that.”
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist.
Despite being listed among countries that showed “high human development,” Turkey still placed behind all European Union member countries and other EU candidates in a UN rating released on Thursday.
Turkey needs to focus its efforts in increasing the average of schooling years to achieve higher ranks.
Despite being listed among countries that showed “high human development,” Turkey still placed behind all European Union member countries and other EU candidates in a UN rating released on Thursday.
The assessment came in the Human Development Index (HDI), an annual measure of well-being that has been published by the UN Development Program (UNDP) for the past 20 years, which combines individual economic prosperity with education levels and life expectancy.
The UNDP placed Norway, Australia and New Zealand at the top and Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe at the bottom, with Western countries again leading the list while sub-Saharan African nations trailing at the bottom.
According to the report, with a value of 0.679, Turkey is listed among countries in the “High Human Development” category, ranking 83rd out of 169 countries. Due to methodological refinements, the 2010 country rankings are not comparable to those from previous years.
Turkey’s ranking in the 2010 HDI puts the country behind all EU member states as well as other EU candidate countries, and places it below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.
Countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania, all of which have lower per capita gross national income levels compared to Turkey, ranked higher in the index as a result of better mean years of schooling and life expectancy rates. Turkey ranked lowest out of the current four EU candidate countries — Croatia, Macedonia and Iceland — all of whom are also OECD countries.
With a 112 percent increase in national income in the past 30 years, Turkey has made noteworthy gains in economic growth and this increase is also reflected in its gross national income. However, the calculation methodology of the HDI uses key data reflecting health and education levels in addition to the national incomes of countries.
Accordingly, the report shows that Turkey needs to focus its efforts in increasing the life expectancy at birth — to 72.2 years for 2010 — and the average of schooling years — to 6.5 years in 2010 — to achieve higher ranks in the HDI, which will bring the country closer to OECD and EU standards.
A gender inequality index within the report, meanwhile, reflected the disadvantage of women in reproductive health, empowerment and economic activity.
Turkey’s ranking in this index, 77th out of 138 countries, put the country behind its neighbors Armenia and Georgia.
ISTANBUL, TURKEY (BNO NEWS) — Half of the deaths in a small Turkish village located in its central region have been caused by a rare type of cancer, mesothelioma, local officials said Friday.
Turkey’s Cappadocia region, located for the most part within Nevsehir Province, includes Tuzkoy village, which is home to a mineral that is found in abundance in the area that causes the rare cancer. As a result, it has killed half the people in Tuzkoy and two surrounding villages.
Murat Tuncer, from the Health Ministry’s department that fights cancer, said the number of cases of mesothelioma cancer in Tuzkoy has been about 600 to 800 times higher than world standards.
Several hundred villagers have been diagnosed with this cancer since 1980 when the information about this cancer was confirmed by authorities. According to reports, 48 percent of all death in the three villages have been caused by mesothelioma.
According to medical experts, cancer victims have inhaled fibers of the mineral erionite in stones and paints used for building homes. The mineral is found in volcanic rocks classified as Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency on Cancer Research.
Mayor Umit Balak said authorities plan on demolishing the village, bury it with earth and plant over it as local officials have been alarmed by the disease, prompting a relocation of the residents. However, a final decision has not been made.
Tuzkoy, with a total population of 2,350, was declared a hazardous zone in 2004 and around 250 families moved a 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) away, to new housing. The rest are expected to move when additional homes are ready, in a project subsidized by the state
The region is touristically known for its picturesque pillars, which were carved into houses, churches, and monasteries, formed millions of years ago by ancient volcanoes. The Göreme Open Air Museum is one of the most visited sites in the area, and includes 30 rock-carved churches and chapels hundreds of years old.
via Mesothelioma – Rare cancer in central Turkey wipes out half of three villages.
Turkey (Ahlul Bayt News Agency) – Istanbul, will host the 10th session of the World Association of the Scientific Miracles in the Quran and Sunnah.
