Ankara - Seven police officers and a television cameraman were injured in Istanbul Monday in a shootout between police and three members of a left-wing group that began after police raided a number of houses in the Turkish city early Monday. Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler said the raids started at 5:30 am (0230 GMT) and the shootout in the suburb of Bostanci on the Asian side of the city was continuing some five hours later.

Guler said the far-left group was planning a "sensational operation".

In a raid on a house in the suburb of Bagcilar, police seized weapons, ammunition and bomb-making materials

Ankara - Turkey has reacted with unease to a statement released Friday night by US President Barack Obama where he described as a "great catastrophe" the deaths of up to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, CNN-Turk reported on Saturday. "There are parts of the statement that I don't agree with," President Abdullah Gul said on the sidelines of a conference in the Bulgarian capital Sofia.

Washington  - US President Barack Obama on Friday called

Ankara  - An investigation was launched Friday into the beating of a 14 year-old boy by a police officer during a pro- Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) protest in the eastern Turkish city of Hakkari, the Anadolu news agency reported.

Television footage showed a Special Operations Team police officer hitting the 14 year-old boy on the head a number of times with the but a semi-automatic rifle. Journalists covering Thursday's protest then went to help the boy who was taken to a local hospital.

Ankara- Turkey and Armenia have agreed on a road map to normalize relations the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced late Wednesday night.

The negotiations "have been working intensively with a view to normalizing their bilateral relations and developing them in a spirit of good-neighbourliness, and mutual respect, and thus to promoting peace, security and stability in the whole region," the ministry said.

The statement said the negotiations have "achieved tangible progress and mutual understanding."

Washington  - The US Armenian community plans to open the Armenian Genocide Museum of America just a block and a half from the White House in less than two years.

In the pecking order of specially themed museums in Washington, the building will be far closer to the seat of US executive power than those dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust, African Art or the American Indian.

Whether that will bring Armenian-Americans any closer to presidential recognition of what they regard as genocide remains to be seen.