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/ 21 October 2007
Kurdish rebels killed at least 12 Turkish soldiers and wounded 16 others in an ambush on Sunday, prompting Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to call crisis talks to consider a military strike against rebel bases in Iraq. The attack came four days after Turkey’s Parliament approved a motion to allow troops to enter northern Iraq.
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/ 17 October 2007
The Turkish Parliament Wednesday voted to allow military strikes against Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq, despite stiff United States opposition and appeals from Baghdad for time to purge the rebels. A government motion seeking a one-year authorisation for one or more incursions into Iraq was approved.
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/ 16 October 2007
Turkey on Tuesday accused Washington of playing "petty" politics and threatened reprisals if the United States Congress votes on a motion branding the World War I massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks an act of genocide. "We see that common sense is gradually losing ground to petty political calculations," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
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/ 12 October 2007
A diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States deepened on Friday after Ankara recalled its ambassador to Washington over a vote in the US Congress to label the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks an act of genocide. The envoy’s recall came as the White House sought to mollify its Nato partner.
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/ 11 September 2007
Turkish police foiled a bomb attack in the capital, Ankara, on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. Ankara’s governor Kemal Onal said police had found a van packed with explosives near a multi-storey carpark in a central district of the city of four million.
Brazilian Felipe Massa secured the fifth win of his Formula One career and the third of this season when he spearheaded a Ferrari one-two in Sunday’s Turkish Grand Prix. The victory revived his hopes of challenging for the drivers’ championship and Ferrari’s bid for the constructors’ title.
Felipe Massa claimed pole position on Saturday for Sunday’s Turkish Grand Prix, beating championship leader Lewis Hamilton of McLaren-Mercedes into second place. Brazilian Massa, who also took pole last year at Istanbul Park, registered a time of one minute, 27,329 seconds for the 5,338km circuit.
Fernando Alonso is refreshed and ready to step up his championship challenge as Formula One heads to Turkey this weekend. The 26-year-old Spaniard has been relaxing on holiday since the pit-lane controversy in Hungary three weeks ago and he is in optimistic mood going into his 100th grand prix.
Turkish internet users have been blocked from accessing sites on the Wordpress.com hosting service. A court in Istanbul ordered the website be blocked after lawyers complained that a number of blogs hosted by Wordpress were libellous of Islamic creationist author Adnan Oktar.
A Turkish plane heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus was hijacked on Saturday, but the hijackers gave themselves up and released all hostages five hours after forcing the plane to land in Turkey. CEO of Atlas Jet airline Tuncay Doganer confirmed that the hijack of the passenger plane had come to an end.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan celebrated on Monday a decisive poll victory but now faces challenges over delayed presidential elections, Kurdish separatist violence and Ankara’s troubled European Union bid. His AK Party boosted its share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections to 46,5%
Turks began voting on Sunday in a parliamentary election pitting the ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party against nationalists who disagree strongly over the future path of the rigidly secular Muslim country. Opinion polls tip the pro-business AK Party to govern alone for five more years, but the size of their majority will be key.
Heavy storms, landslides, flash floods and lightning have killed at least 23 people in Europe and Turkey, officials said on Monday. Nine people died in eastern Turkey, including six killed in severe flooding in mountainous Agri province near the Iranian border, where river waters were swollen by melting snows. Two more people were missing.
A bomb exploded on Tuesday in one of the Turkish capital’s busiest commercial centres, killing five people and wounding dozens, the prime minister said. More than 60 people were injured in the blast, which ripped through the business centre of the capital, authorities said.
Tens of thousands of people waving red Turkish flags filled the streets of the Black Sea city of Samsun on Sunday to protest against the Islamist-rooted government ahead of a July election. ”No to Sharia [Islamic law]”, ”Turkey is secular and will remain secular”, the crowd chanted in the main square.
A bicycle bomb detonated in a market in the Turkish port of Izmir on Saturday, injuring 12 people, two of them seriously, police said. The blast came one day before a planned anti-government rally in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, amid rising political tensions ahead of a July general election
Turkey’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday annulled the first round of a parliamentary vote for a new president in a move likely to pave the way for early general elections. The court ruled that the 550-seat Parliament should have convened with at least 367 deputies for the voting to have begun.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday called on Turks to remain united in pursuing the country’s remarkable economic effort, but made no mention of the current crisis sparked by the presidential election. ”My fellow citizens: union, unity and solidarity are our most important needs,” said Erdogan.
An eight-storey building collapsed in Istanbul on Thursday, but authorities said they did not expect a great number of casualties as people ran away when they heard the building start to crack. It was not clear how many people were inside the building in the Sirinevler district on the European side of Istanbul, but most people had left the building before the collapse.
Australian Ducati rider Casey Stoner won the Turkish MotoGP on Sunday. Stoner — who leads the standings by 10 points heading towards the China GP — won his second race of the season to beat home Spaniard Tony Elias on a Honda while another Ducati rider, Loris Capirossi of Italy, was third.
A Turkish man hijacked a commercial passenger plane on Tuesday flying from the mainly Kurdish south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, but then gave himself up to the authorities, an Ankara airport official said, adding that police believed he acted from personal, not political motives, and may be mentally ill.
Thirty-one people were killed on Tuesday when their chartered plane crashed while trying to land in foggy conditions in Iraq, Turkish officials said. The Moldovan Antonov-26, which took off from the Turkish city of Adana early on Tuesday, was carrying about 35 people, including 30 construction workers, the officials said.
As the magnitude of an earthquake in a television advert gradually mounts, the stone letters ”Istanbul” crack and then crumble to dust. If it seems alarmist, builder Cuneyt Kilic, whose company AKS Anatolian Housing is behind the graphic depicting the collapse of Turkey’s largest city, says it is merely realistic.
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/ 1 December 2006
Pope Benedict XVI left Turkey on Friday after a momentous visit in which he reached out to Muslims and Orthodox Christians. Coming a mere 10 weeks after the leader of the world’s 1,1-billion Catholics outraged Muslims by appearing to equate Islam with violence, the four-day trip — Pope Benedict’s first to a Muslim country — turned into a fence-mending mission.
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/ 30 November 2006
Pope Benedict visited Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on Thursday during his trip to predominantly Muslim Turkey, becoming only the second Roman Catholic pontiff to ever enter a mosque. The visit was seen as another gesture of reconciliation by the Pontiff after he infuriated much of the Muslim world with comments taken as indicating he believed Islam was violent and irrational.
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/ 30 November 2006
Pope Benedict XVI met with the head of the Greek Orthodox Church on Wednesday to pursue a key goal of his papacy: healing a rift between the two feuding branches of Christianity that dates back nearly a millennium. Benedict XVI and Bartholomew I prayed together at the patriarchal church of St George before holding private talks.
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/ 28 November 2006
Pope Benedict XVI began a delicate mission to Turkey on Tuesday, trading conciliatory gestures with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as both sought to calm the storm unleashed when the pontiff appeared to link Islam to violence. The pope, in a striking reversal of opinion, said he backed Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.
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/ 28 November 2006
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday begins his first visit to a Muslim country, a four-day trip to Turkey where his controversial remarks in September linking Islam and violence remain fresh in memories. With tensions running high, security measures are even tighter than those taken for United States President George Bush in 2004.
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/ 7 November 2006
Earthquake-prone Istanbul launched a major disaster simulation on Tuesday, after two small tremors reignited criticism that not enough has been done to protect the city of 12-million. Almost 18 000 people were killed in 1999 when a strong earthquake hit north-western Turkey, including Istanbul.
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/ 6 November 2006
Former Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit (81), who died late on Sunday after five-and-a-half months in a coma, was a staunch nationalist and a symbol of probity in the country’s corruption-plagued politics. Once a leader of the Turkish left, he was also in his younger years a well-known poet and a translator of TS Eliot and Rabindranath Tagore.
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/ 24 October 2006
An earthquake measuring 5,2 on the Richter scale hit north-western Turkey on Tuesday and was felt in Istanbul, just days after another quake of the same size in the area, Turkey’s earthquake monitoring centre said. No injuries or damages were reported. The quake’s epicentre was in the Sea of Marmara, which lies alongside Istanbul.
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/ 19 October 2006
Turkey’s Parliament backed on Tuesday a declaration condemning the French National Assembly’s approval of a draft Bill that would make it a crime to deny Armenians suffered genocide by Ottoman Turks in 1915. But the government stopped short of taking measures against French interests and companies, aware this could harm Turkey’s economy more than France’s.