Turkey said Monday an agreement to train and equip thousands of moderate Syrian opposition fighters would be concluded later in January after several months of talks with the United States. 

The program is a key pillar of Turkish policy on Syria which aims to simultaneously pressure not only Islamist extremists but also the Damascus regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Four Turkish ex-ministers who resigned over a 2013 graft scandal that shook President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government will not have to stand trial, a commission ruled Monday, in a decision the opposition called a "black day" for democracy. 

The parliamentary commission's decision appears to draw a line under the December 2013 scandal which presented Erdogan, then prime minister, with one of the biggest crises of his rule over Turkey.

Turkish authorities on Monday detained at least 34 police officers in a new wave of raids over the illegal eavesdropping of top officials including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, state media said. 

Police conducted raids in 13 cities across Turkey and detained officers accused of wiretapping key figures including businessmen, politicians and government officials, Anatolia news agency reported. 

Annual inflation in Turkey ticked up to 8.17 percent in 2014, slightly higher than 2013 and well over the central bank's medium-term target, the state statistics office said Monday.

However the figure was lower than expected by analysts, with inflation falling 0.44 percent in December from November.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov reportedly had a stormy meeting with Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last month.

The Saudi al-Watan daily on Sunday quoted sources as saying that during his talks with Nasrallah, Bogdanov proposed the possibility of naming a new Syrian president to lead a transitional government.

Turkey's Islamic-rooted government has authorized the building of the first church in the country in nearly a century, officials said Saturday.

The church is for the tiny Syriac community in Turkey and will be built in the Istanbul suburb of Yesilkoy on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, which already has Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches.

Turkey's Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu on Friday faced a barrage of criticism on social media after suggesting that women should prioritize the "career" of motherhood before anything else. 

"Women of the world have the career of motherhood that no one else can experience," Turkish media quoted Muezzinoglu as saying on Thursday at a hospital where he welcomed the first baby born in Istanbul on New Year's Day.

An outlawed Turkish Marxist group on Friday said it was behind an attempted attack on an Ottoman-era Istanbul palace that formerly held the offices of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Revolutionary People's Liberation Party–Front (DHKP-C) said one of its members carried out the attempted attack on Thursday afternoon outside the historic Dolmabahce palace in Istanbul on the Bosphorus.

Cyprus warned Turkey Friday that if it re-entered the exclusive economic zone where Nicosia has licensed exploratory drilling there would be no chance of resuming stalled U.N.-brokered peace talks.

Government spokesman Nicos Christodoulides said any such a move would be a "worrying development" and would only "validate the reason for not returning to the talks".

The trial opened at an Ankara court on Friday of 13 former Turkish police officers accused of setting up bugs to eavesdrop on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while he was prime minister.

The defendants are accused of carrying out and aiding political espionage as well as the violation of the privacy of public officials, the official Anatolia news agency reported.