The revamped Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) was launched by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Diyarbakır last week in the company of 12 of his ministers, 75 deputies and an army of bureaucrats. In the biggest sports stadium in Diyarbakır (which only hosts 1,300 people), he spoke for two hours about the new program and how it will change the socioeconomic structure of the region.

Everybody is asking if America is in decline. The new big question from the journal Foreign Affairs is whether the American era is over. Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek, answers with a book, his new release "The Post-American World," in which he proposes a number of ideas and strategies for the US power to survive the "rise of the rest."

Turkey has one of the youngest populations in the world, with about 20 million people between the ages 15 and 30. According to the 2007 census, about 60 percent of the total population of Turkey is under the age of 30. So just what is this young and extremely dynamic population doing?

To continue our discussion from last week, Turkey's smart power is a strategic combination of soft and hard power, but the result is more than a plate of carrots and sticks.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) will hold its general congress over the weekend. Deniz Baykal is once again a candidate for the party's leadership and appears to not have a viable challenger so far.

Sharing power is never easy. Politics thrives on accumulating more power. Empires are built around it. You can defeat your opponents by stick or by carrot, but either way you need power.

On Monday, the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) highest body announced the party's strategy for the closure case opened against it.

With the court case against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) officially started, Turkey has entered a new period of political uncertainty.

This is a question you get all the time when the conversation turns to Islam and the Muslim world. And it is usually followed by another set of questions: What do Muslims think about terrorist attacks? Do they really believe in democracy and human rights? Are women treated equally in Muslim societies? Can Muslims live in peace with other religions and cultures?

If there is one golden rule for understanding Turkish politics, it is this: You can never take anything for granted in Turkey. A case filed against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has come as a shock to many Turks as well as international observers.

Doing the right thing at the right time is essential for finding a comprehensive solution to the Kurdish issue. Half-baked measures will not produce concrete results.

According to a Herald Tribune report ("Young Iraqis are Losing their Faith in Religion," March 3, 2008), Iraqi youth are losing their religious faith.

Who talks about religion in Turkey? And how do they talk about it? We took up these two questions on the state-owned TRT 1 station last week.

The debate over lifting the headscarf ban has turned into a larger debate about freedoms in Turkey. While the vast majority of Turks support the expansion of civil liberties, there seems to be a fundamental disagreement as to how freedoms should be prioritized. The problem with this is that until and unless the question of freedoms is taken as a whole, there will be no guarantee for civil liberties in Turkey.

The race for the presidential nomination in the US is heating up. While John McCain seems to have secured his nomination for the Republican Party, the battle on the Democratic side is not subsiding, and the Obama-Clinton rivalry is likely to continue for a few more weeks. What after that?

Freedom of religion and worship is a fundamental human right that everyone should enjoy regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality or religious preference. The right to follow a particular religion and practice its rituals is recognized as legitimate by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

A debate over the headscarf is revealing new dimensions of political discourse in Turkey. While conservatives and liberals use the universal language of basic rights and liberties, laicists use a heavily religious language to prove that the headscarf is not a religious obligation.