Türkiye
Istanbul's removed mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu announced on Wednesday from Silivri prison that he is leaving the Republican People's Party after 17 years as a member, and is instead backing the Yeni Parti that Özgür Özel founded on 24 July. "Today, we are opening a NEW path", he wrote, linking to the party's membership and donation pages. İmamoğlu is held in the large corruption case against the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, and his departure removes the last doubt about where the opposition's centre of gravity now sits.
Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş said on Wednesday that a new constitution is "a political responsibility, a responsibility that politics has towards society", and that the present text still carries "the spirit of the 1980 military coup" despite its many amendments. He made the case a day after the PKK disarmament law passed with backing from nearly every party, describing the current chamber as an opportunity to deliver. No timetable and no draft text were presented.
Kurtulmuş and Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi brought governors, police chiefs and gendarmerie commanders from all 81 provinces together by video link on Wednesday to work through how the law will be applied on the ground. The law on strengthening national solidarity and social integration takes effect only once the security agencies certify that the PKK/KCK has ceased operations and surrendered all weapons, and the National Security Council endorses that finding. The meeting also covered guarding against provocations.
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and Presidential Council head Mohammed al-Menfi in Tripoli on Wednesday, then Khalifa Haftar and House Speaker Aguila Saleh in Benghazi. The visit is "a concrete manifestation of our one Libya policy, which makes no distinction between Libya's west, east and south", he said. Ankara is trying to hold a line to both centres of power at once, while drone strikes hit oil installations west of Tripoli.
The Treasury and Finance Ministry has completed a cut in the special consumption tax on diesel, to be published in the Official Gazette and take effect immediately. The stated purpose is to stop costlier diesel feeding into transport, agricultural and industrial costs and adding to inflation. Brent traded near $90 a barrel on Wednesday because of the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Neither the size of the cut nor its expected effect at the pump has been given.
Europe
NATO ambassadors met on Wednesday and stated that "Russia bears full responsibility for the airspace violations, which are dangerous and unacceptable". Behind it are repeated drones over Romanian territory and a cruise missile that came down in Poland on 29 July about fifty kilometres from Lublin. Secretary General Mark Rutte called the incidents reckless, and Poland's defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said the alliance is ready for new measures along the eastern flank.
Source:
Euronews · Wednesday, 12 August 2026
The government approved a broad reform on Wednesday letting the foreign intelligence service BND and the domestic service BfV run cyberattacks on hostile IT systems and sabotage operations abroad, with a continuing ban on lethal action. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt spoke of a new era, saying "we are transforming our intelligence services into genuine secret services". The Left Party and the FDP call the reform unconstitutional overreach; Clara Bünger described it as oblivious to history and irresponsible.
Source:
Euronews · Wednesday, 12 August 2026
On Tuesday 20.4 percent of French nuclear capacity was unavailable, the largest shortfall on record, with 13 of EDF's 57 reactors affected: eight fully shut down and five running at reduced power. At Gravelines, Western Europe's largest nuclear plant, a swarm of jellyfish clogged the cooling pumps at five of six reactors. The other outages are down to the heat and low river flows, which limit cooling water. The energy analyst Nicolas Goldberg judges that there is enough leeway that supply is not at risk in the short term.
Source:
Euronews · Wednesday, 12 August 2026
