Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a trilateral defence agreement in Mecca on Friday. It stipulates that an armed attack on any one of the three countries will be regarded as an attack on all of them. The deal widens to Türkiye the joint defence pact Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed in Riyadh in September 2025.
The Justice Commission began an article-by-article review on Aug. 7 of the Draft Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration, submitted on Aug. 5 and expected to reach the General Assembly early next week. It offers limited and conditional legal relief for membership, leadership, assistance and propaganda offences linked to the PKK, while excluding intentional killings and the gravest crimes committed before June 2005, and its justification states that it is not a general amnesty. The measures would take effect only once security institutions determine that the group has surrendered all weapons, confirmed by the National Security Council and published in the Official Gazette.
Police detained 15 people on Friday in the third phase of a bribery and extortion investigation into the opposition-run Kuşadası municipality, led by the İstanbul chief prosecutor's office, with detention warrants issued for 21 in all. Among those sought are lawyer Ezgi Tezcan Yaşar, daughter of New Party MP Bülent Tezcan, and her husband Umut Yaşar, both of whom represent the municipality's jailed mayor Ömer Günel. Tezcan said the pair were abroad on holiday and would return as soon as possible, and that they had nothing to fear.
New court statistics show 76 findings that freedom of expression had been violated between January and June. Over the same period the court received 29,605 individual applications and concluded 17,792 cases, finding at least one constitutional violation in 485 applications once those on the right to trial within a reasonable time are set aside. Since individual applications became available in 2012 the court has identified 4,972 free expression violations, along with 1,762 on assembly and demonstration and 347 on the right to life.
Ömer Bolat held a virtual meeting on Aug. 6 with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, framed around the $100 billion bilateral trade target set by Erdoğan and Trump, and said he had conveyed Ankara's expectations on the ongoing trade negotiations. The same day Bolat met Poland's finance and economy minister Andrzej Domański in Warsaw, where the two agreed to convene a Türkiye and Poland investment and business forum in Türkiye this autumn. Bolat put trade with Poland at a record $12.5 billion in 2025 and said $15 billion was within reach.
Spain will impose temporary checks on travellers arriving from Italy from midnight on Saturday until 7 September, after Rome imposed a month of checks on arrivals from Spain following the mass crossing into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July. Foreign minister José Manuel Albares called the Italian measure a torpedo fired at the hull of European unity and demanded that it be lifted. Giorgia Meloni's government replied that it had no intention of revising the decision before 15 August, citing Spanish expectations of a new wave of arrivals at Ceuta.
Zelenskyy arrived on Friday for his first official visit to Serbia, one of the few European countries that have kept friendly relations with Moscow, and said he would meet President Aleksandar Vučić and Prime Minister Đuro Macut. He named expanded economic ties, relations with the European Union and security issues as the agenda. Serbia has refused to join sanctions on Russia, relies almost entirely on Russia for energy, and its EU accession has stalled partly because of its policies toward Moscow.
The European Union's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Friday that the bloc had imposed sanctions on five individuals involved in Russia's military-industrial complex. The step follows recent Russian air strikes on Ukraine.
Momentum is building behind a third term for the European Parliament's conservative president Roberta Metsola, Euronews reports. That would cut across the informal rotation agreed among the centrist political forces and puts the Socialists and Democrats on the back foot.
The Senate approved a punishing Russian sanctions package on Friday by 86 votes to 11, the result of a year-long campaign by Senator Lindsey Graham, who died on 11 July. The bill would penalise countries that keep buying Russian oil, gas and other exports, and allows the president to impose tariffs on the largest purchasers. Trump has given a nod to the package, which also carries his push for sanctions on Iran.
Right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, 48, took the presidential oath on Friday in Cali rather than the capital Bogotá, a city that has long borne the brunt of the state's conflict with armed groups. He said the option of dialogue was completely exhausted and pledged to relentlessly defeat narco-terrorism, a break with the negotiated peace pursued by Gustavo Petro, whom he beat in June's run-off. He also called for responsible and sustainable fracking and said he would strengthen the state oil company Ecopetrol.
Prosecutors filed an indictment on Thursday at a district court in southern Israel against a settler for the killing of Palestinian activist Awdah Al Hathaleen in the occupied West Bank last year. The rights group B'Tselem said it is the first time since 7 October 2023 that an Israeli has been indicted for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank.
The health ministry's latest situation report gives 4,053 Bundibugyo cases and 1,850 deaths since the outbreak was declared in mid-May, across 53 health zones in five provinces, with 87 percent of cases in Ituri. WHO vaccine experts recommended on Friday a full-scale human trial of Ervebo, licensed against the Zaire strain, to test whether it also protects against Bundibugyo, for which no vaccine exists. Only West Africa's 2014 to 2016 epidemic has been larger.
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson set out savings of 70 billion kronor to cover election pledges worth 68 billion: 40 billion from cutting agency bureaucracy and setting up a waste commission, 21 billion from lower structural unemployment, reduced taxes on labour and adjustments to the A-kassa unemployment insurance, and 10 billion from tackling welfare fraud. None of the funding should be obtained in a way that affects hard-working people, she said. The party also wants to shift part of the international aid budget to welfare and defence.
Figures from the comparison site Elskling put June and July 2026 together as the second most expensive on record, beaten only by the energy crisis of summer 2022. June spot prices ran between 150 and 1,400 percent above the same month last year. Electricity price analyst Krisztian Horvath describes a perfect storm: slowly filling hydropower reservoirs in both Sweden and Norway, a particularly strained year for nuclear availability, uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz feeding into global gas prices, and European heat driving up cooling demand on the continent.