Call for Nominations: TASSA Young Scholar Awards
TASSA launches a new award to recognize the achievements of young Turkish American scholars, as part of its 2014 Annual Meeting. The scholars are invited to submit a nomination (including self-nominations) for the inaugural TASSA Young Scholar Awards. The deadline is on January 6, 2014. The nomination package should include the nominee's latest CV along with one article (already published in the literature or a working manuscript) that exemplifies the best work of the nominee. Each winner will receive an Award Certificate at the conference, and is expected to deliver a short oral presentation during the TASSA Annual Meeting, to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park, on March 22-23, 2014.
Dr. Ülkü Ülgür, co-founder and first president of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA), is being honored by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) with a namesake award to recognize his lifelong work and leadership in children's mental health. 
ANKARA — Turkey selected a local shipyard to award the country’s first-ever contract for the acquisition of a Landing Platform Dock (LPD), a deal industry sources estimated at about $500 million. Turkey’s procurement agency, the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries (SSM), announced on its web page late Dec. 27 that it picked up Sedef Gemi Insaati A.S., a privately-owned Istanbul shipyard, to open contract negotiations for the LPD program. 
Dr. Mehmet Oz will be moving his popular talk show from Fox 5 to WSB-TV in the fall of 2014, replacing Katie Couric's talk show, WSB-TV general manager Tim McVay confirmed. Couric's show, which debuted in the fall of 2012 and airs weekdays on WSB-TV at 3 p.m., will not be back this fall after it failed to break into the top echelon of talk shows. While ratings weren't bad, Deadline.com reported that it was a very pricey show to produce and license. 
After Whole Foods announced it won't sell Chobani yogurt starting next year, Chobani's CEO told CNBC on Thursday that it will not hurt the business. "We grew about 30 percent this year, and we wanted to grow more and more places, not less places," Chobani's CEO, Hamdi Ulukaya, told CNBC.
Moinak Mitra, The Economic Times - 
In 2012, TCF awarded a grant to Billings Middle School in Seattle, WA to support a pilot year of teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The project was spearheaded by Rebecca Timson, Dean of Faculty of the school and an alumnus (2007) of the TCF Teacher Study Tours to Turkey.
For millennia, Turkey’s Marmara has been a physical and figurative bridge between Eastern and Western cultures, religions, and histories. It was here, at this crossroad of civilization, where Persian King Xerxes built his famed bridge of boats over the Dardanelles for his conquest of Europe. Here, on the treacherous waters of the Bosphorus, Jason led the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece. Up against the legendry Walls of Troy, an impossible beauty launched a thousand ships and a wooden horse destroyed an ancient people. 
On December 17, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) reversed the criminal conviction by a Swiss court of Dogu Percinek, a Turkish politician who publicly challenged that Armenians were subject to genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire nearly 100 years ago. The ECHR is an international court whose decisions are binding in 47 countries, including all of the European Union and every NATO member state except the U.S. and Iceland. Some 800 million people are subject to its jurisdiction. It has rendered judgment in more than 10,000 cases since its founding in 1959. 
NEW YORK—PEN American Center is thrilled by the news that Turkish translator, writer, and peaceful activist Ayşe Berktay has been released from prison pending trial today, but remains deeply troubled that her ongoing prosecution is indicative of a continued assault on writers, journalists, and scholars whose views the Turkish government disfavors. Ayşe Berktay’s next hearing will take place on January 30, 2014. 
SALT LAKE CITY — It took a mighty good cause for Enes Kanter to give up a SpongeBob SquarePants toy he recently bought. But, yes, he did it for the kids. On Monday morning, the Jazz center, jokingly called “Kanter Klaus” by the team’s community relations department, put on a seasonal red-and-white cap and donated more than 200 stuffed animals, Jazz basketballs and toys to the Toys for Tots program. “I’m the Turkey Santa today,” Kanter said with a big smile. The Turkish citizen doesn’t personally celebrate Christmas as a Muslim, but he appreciates the Christian holiday and wanted to spread joy to children.
Clifton, NJ - Comodo, a leading Certificate Authority and Internet security organization, today announced that their Cloud-based AntiSpam Gateway (ASG) service filtered its 50 millionth email on Sunday, December 1, 2013. To-date, ASG has filtered 50,911,110 emails of which 37,954,073 were found to be spam and over 140,000 viruses were blocked by ASG. Live statistics are available of the Antispam website found here http://www.comodo.com/business-security/email-security/antispam-gateway.php. 
NEW YORK — Chobani says it will air its first Super Bowl ad this February, an effort to make the Greek-yogurt company more of a household name. The debut on advertising’s biggest stage comes as Greek yogurt continues to surge in popularity. Known for its thick texture and tart taste, Greek yogurt accounts for more than a third of the U.S. yogurt market, up from just 1 percent in 2007, according to a Bernstein Research report. The figure is expected to top 50 percent in coming years. Chobani is the market leader but says only about a third of Americans are familiar with its brand. 
By Jonathan Friedman-Forbes - Turkey sent a ripple through the Western defense industry when it recently chose a Chinese company to co-produce a missile defense system—passing on US and European bids in the process. It certainly didn’t help that the Chinese company, China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp (CPMIEC), is on a US blacklist for selling arms to the likes of Iran, North Korea, and Syria. In the weeks that followed, news reports detailed Turkish support for radical fighters in Syria and revelations that Turkey’s spymaster dimed out Israeli intelligence sources in Iran. The spate of events caused some to question whether Turkey is still a Western ally. 
