Ali Fazıl Kasap left the Republican People's Party (CHP) on 14 August and joined the New Path alliance, restoring it to the twenty deputies a bloc needs to keep group status in parliament. The bloc had fallen to nineteen after Mustafa Bilici crossed to the governing AKP. Kasap made the same move in December 2023 to save the Felicity Party's group, and his departure leaves the CHP with 44 lawmakers.
Pervin Buldan and Mithat Sancar visited Selahattin Demirtaş, a former co-chair of the HDP, and Selçuk Mızraklı, a former mayor of Diyarbakır, on 15 August, and said afterwards that their friends should not be deprived of their freedom "even for an hour" longer. The two have acted as intermediaries between Ankara and the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, and met Erdoğan on 13 August. The initiative gained its legal framework when parliament passed a twelve-article law on national solidarity and strengthening social integration on 10 August, by 467 votes to 87 with seven abstentions.
Four aircraft from three Turkish air bases took part on 13 August in a NATO integrated air and missile defence exercise in Romanian airspace, according to Türkiye's defence ministry. They were two F-16s from Bandırma, one E-7T airborne early warning aircraft from Konya and one KC-135R refuelling tanker from Adana. The ministry described the exercise as the first time low-speed interception training had been carried out within this form of joint activity.
An object that washed ashore on Başoğlu beach in Kaynarca, in Sakarya province, turned out to be the fuselage of a Russian-made Gerbera type unmanned aircraft, carrying no explosive. The gendarmerie and the coast guard called in the navy's underwater disposal team, known as SAS after the emergency line took a report. The find is the latest in a long series of drones recovered along Türkiye's Black Sea coast since the war in Ukraine began, in provinces including Ordu, Zonguldak, Bartın, Samsun and Istanbul.
A drone that entered Romanian airspace from Moldova was detected at 04:44 about 24 kilometres north of Galați and shot down at 05:01 by a Spanish F-18 flying a NATO air policing mission from Mihail Kogălniceanu air base. The wreckage is believed to have fallen on unpopulated land between the villages of Băleni and Cudalbi. It was the fourth drone destroyed over Romania this year, after Romanian F-16s brought down three in July, the first time the country itself had destroyed such aircraft following dozens of incursions.
The fire in eastern Belgium doubled in size over twenty-four hours to Sunday morning and is the largest in the country's recorded history. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism was activated on Saturday, and three helicopters and two water-bombing aircraft arrived from Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Fires were burning at the same time in several other European countries, among them Greece and Croatia, where thousands of people have been forced from their homes.
Moroccan security forces on Saturday dispersed hundreds of people who had been hiding in hill country outside Fnideq, south-west of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Moroccan media report that 294 people were arrested, 46 of them Moroccan and the rest from countries south of the Sahara. The operation answered a call on social media for a fresh mass crossing, after tens of thousands of people crossed on foot and by swimming on 30 and 31 July, in an episode in which humanitarian organisations count at least 141 dead.
The agreement was signed on 17 June by Donald Trump and Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian after talks hosted by Pakistan, and was meant to end more than three months of war. It expires on Monday 17 August with each side accusing the other of breaching it. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on Telegram on Saturday that Iran has not yet decided to restart negotiations with the United States, while mediators from Qatar and Pakistan keep exchanging messages. The text allowed a maximum of 60 days to reach a final deal, required Washington to end its naval blockade within 30 days and promised a reconstruction package of at least 300 billion dollars; on 7 July Trump declared the agreement "over".
The foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt say in a joint statement that Israel's rejection of a fifteen-point roadmap "amounts to a direct repudiation of the Comprehensive Plan" and that responsibility for obstructing the peace effort now rests with Israel. The roadmap comes from the Board of Peace, the body Donald Trump chairs, and had according to the statement already been accepted by Palestinian factions. Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the rejection to his cabinet and has said Israeli forces will not leave Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed. The eight specified no consequences.
The Arab League's spokesperson Gamal Roshdy calls the attacks on Nabatieh and the surrounding villages and towns, under way since the morning of 15 August, "a clear violation of Lebanon's sovereignty" and an escalation that could derail efforts to resolve the conflict. Israeli air strikes on the southern towns of Deir al-Zahrani and Ansar killed eleven people, among them children, and wounded nineteen, despite the ceasefire. The Israeli prime minister's office acknowledged that civilians were killed and claimed Hezbollah had placed civilians in the area. The ceasefire took effect on 17 April and has been extended several times; Lebanon's health ministry says strikes since 2 March have killed 4,335 people.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Donald Trump wrote that the exercises are costly and send a signal that is "totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea, which he described as respectful during his time in the White House. He said it was too late to cancel them and that he had therefore instructed defence secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" them. The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise is due to run for eleven days from 17 to 27 August with 18,000 South Korean soldiers, and South Korea's defence ministry said it would proceed as scheduled.
After Jimmie Åkesson told P1 Morgon that the Sweden Democrats want to spend nothing at all on integration, the Liberal leader Simona Mohamsson answered that the government is agreed on "effective integration built on facts" and that not everything is about money but about governance. She rejected the idea of a conflict with the Sweden Democrats and placed the conflict instead between the Liberals and the left-wing parties. On the same day, Friday 14 August, a study commissioned by the government and built on the World Values Survey was presented, according to which one migrant in five who has lived in Sweden for more than twenty years has never been in paid work.
Finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson (M) announced on Friday that the government and the Sweden Democrats are setting up an inquiry, presented as a "waste commission", to go through state spending and test what the state should do more and less of. The stated reasons are to secure higher defence spending and to levy no more tax than necessary. Åke Nordlander, director-general of the Swedish Export Credits Guarantee Board, becomes special investigator, with an interim report due by 12 March 2027 and a final report by 21 January 2028.