A jury found Friend Rizkkhalil, 51, of Atlantic Beach, guilty on three counts of grand theft involving three woman and more than $100,000. Rizkkhalil now faces up to 35 years in a Florida state prison. A sentencing hearing is scheduled before Judge Mark Borello the week of Nov. 13. Each count represents a different victim of Rizkkhalil’s crimes. From October 2016 to Jun 2017, Rizkkhalil posed as a Turkish businessman named Murat Karanan as he conned a female victim out of approximately $8,400. He did so by convincing her to invest in an import-export business that did not actually exist.

In September, TCA President G. Lincoln McCurdy met with several members of Congress to convey the importance of engaging with the Turkish American community and encouraging Turkish Americans to be more involved in the political arena. Between September 28-29, McCurdy met with Congresswoman Annie Kuster (D-NH/2nd) at an event in Whitfield, New Hampshire. Congressman Richard Neal (D-MA/1st), who is the Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee, also attended the event.

Turkish Heritage Organization is proud to launch a Non-Resident Fellowship program aiming to promote Turkish-American Relations during a critical time for the regional and global politics. We strongly believe that this fellowship program will help building bridges between Ankara and Washington, D.C., while helping civic leaders develop their research capacity and focus on various areas of interest. Since the Turkish-American alliance exists on more than just the governmental level, THO's inaugural Non-Resident Fellowship Program, highlighting people-to-people relations between these two countries, aims to create a knowledge-sharing platform to support future and emerging leaders eager to make a positive contribution to Turkish-American relations. Twelve fellows from Turkey and the U.S. will focus on and contribute to different issues from energy, to humanitarian assistance, security, and geopolitics. They will be sharing their research with the public and creating discussion platforms to facilitate increased understanding and awareness on said topics.

Big-ticket donors watch expectantly from a parking lot across the street as Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol transforms the billowing steel superstructure of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles into a swirling, phantasmagorical collage. The 12-minute performance is fashioned from artefacts from the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s history: millions of photographs, printed programmes and audio and video recordings, each one digitised and algorithmically activated to play in abstract form across the building’s dynamic metal surface. WDCH Dreams, as the production is known, kicked off the orchestra’s centennial season with the kind of brio that befits the company Zachary Wolfe described in 2017, in The New York Times, as “the most important orchestra in America. Period.”