Ankara - Nineteen prison employees in Turkey were suspended Tuesday on suspicion of taking part or being an accomplice in the torture and murder of leftist activist Engin Ceber in Istanbul last week, the Anadolu news agency reported.

The list of those suspended included a number of senior officials at Istanbul's Metris Prison, as well as the prison doctor who had written a report on Ceber's health without ever seeing the prisoner.

Istanbul, Oct 14 : Archaeologists have found a tomb featuring intricate mosaics in a district in Turkey, which includes 55 skeletons buried in five graves and 18 pieces of delicate 
1,700-year-old golden jewelry.

According to a report in Turkish Daily News, Austrian Archaeological Committee President Sabine Ladstatter said that they found a variety of objects, including silk clothes with golden threads, but that the jewels in particular were a big surprise.

“The uncovered pieces have meticulous details. So, these graves surely belonged to upper-class people in Ephesus,” she said.

Ankara - Turkey is to send a government delegation to Baghdad Tuesday in an attempt to push authorites in northern Iraq to clamp down on the activities of the separatist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) who use the mountainous northern areas as a base to launch attacks inside Turkey, the NTV private television station reported.

The delegation is expected to meet Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Administration, and to express Ankara's disappointment that more action is not being taken against the PKK.

Ankara - When Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk opens the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, he will do so not just as Turkey's most famous novelist, but also as one of its most controversial.

Pamuk has never been far from debate inside Turkey, where he has critics in both the religious conservative camp and the secular establishment.

But what really riled Turkish nationalists were his comments in 2005 concerning the massacres of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War and Turkey's continuing fight against Kurdish separatists.

Ankara - Turkey's role as special guest at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair is a great shot in the arm for the country's publishing industry, which has been suffering from a slowdown in sales just as Turkish literature hits new heights.

The publishing sector is relatively new in Turkey. In Ottoman times, low literacy rates - in part thanks to the Arabic script in which Turkish was written - and the gulf between formal and folk Turkish meant that very few books were published at all.

Frankfurt - The Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual five-day session of book-publishing negotiations, opens in Germany this Wednesday with Turkey in the limelight as a special guest.

World book publishing is a slow-growth industry at the best of times. The threat of a global recession is bringing more jitters to a sector that is already being scorched by the spread of free knowledge on the internet.