Türkiye
A court on 16 August ordered the arrest pending trial of Alihan Kuriş, leader of the Süleymancılar religious community, together with 31 other suspects in a money laundering and corruption investigation; six people, among them Ahmet Gökcen, a former member of the HSK board of judges and prosecutors, were placed under house arrest. Investigators have identified 32 companies with ties to the movement and say more than 100 billion liras, about two billion dollars, were allegedly moved abroad; Kuriş was reportedly captured hiding in a concealed compartment of a house not registered in his name. Prosecutors stress that the investigation does not concern the community's religious activities, but moving against one of the country's largest religious movements is politically charged.
Donald Trump calls the defence agreement between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan a "big, bold and important first step" and a sign that the Middle East "is coming together". The pact was signed on 7 August in Mecca by Erdoğan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and holds that an armed attack on one of the countries is regarded as an attack on all three. Egypt's foreign minister Badr Abdelatty says Cairo is "studying the possibility of joining", and his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan calls Egypt a natural partner he expects in the alliance; for Ankara the pact means a central place in the Gulf's security order as the United States pulls back.
Through presidential decrees dated 15 August, published in the official gazette on Sunday, Türkiye declares two marine national parks: one in the northeastern Aegean and one in the eastern Mediterranean between Fethiye and Kaş. Greece's foreign ministry calls the designation unlawful to the extent the parks extend beyond Turkish territorial waters, and states that it produces no legal effect either in international waters or with regard to Greece's rights over its continental shelf. Ankara presents the move as environmental protection; the row mirrors Turkish protests last year, when Greece established parks of its own in the Ionian and the Aegean.
Source:
To Vima · Sunday, 16 August 2026
The municipal council in Menderes, in İzmir province, elected the AKP's Asuman Şen acting mayor with 15 votes in the fourth round, against 12 for the New Party's Barış Gürsoy, after the elected CHP mayor İlkay Çiçek was detained and removed from office in a corruption investigation. The CHP won 18 of 31 council seats in 2024, but nine members have crossed to the newly formed New Party, founded by former CHP leader Özgür Özel, and three have been arrested in the investigation. The outcome shows how the opposition split hands the governing party local footholds even where it lacks a majority of its own.
Europe
The EU's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas tells Die Welt she will put forward "the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war" this autumn: once adopted, she says, they would raise the number of sanctioned Russian entities by a third at a stroke. EU diplomats tell Reuters the bloc's diplomatic service will propose about 1,600 individuals and companies tied to the military-industrial complex, to be presented in early September and adopted in October; nearly 3,000 names are already listed. Kallas estimates the sanctions have so far deprived Russia's war machine of more than one trillion euros.
A court in Pskov on Monday sentenced Lev Shlosberg, one of the Yabloko party's senior figures, to eleven years and one month in prison for statements against the war in Ukraine, ahead of next month's parliamentary election. The same day Russia's Supreme Court rejected the party's appeal and upheld the decision barring Yabloko, the only party overtly opposing the war, from the vote of 18 to 20 September. The two rulings complete the removal of war opposition from Russian electoral politics.
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PBS News · Monday, 17 August 2026
Robert Jenrick, Reform UK's economics spokesperson, set out in a speech on Monday the plan that only British citizens should be entitled to benefits such as universal credit, child benefit, housing benefit and pension credit, with exceptions for military service and for those who have paid into the state pension system; the party claims a saving of 21 billion pounds a year by 2029. The proposal covers EU citizens with post-Brexit settled status and would require renegotiating the withdrawal agreement with Brussels. Labour answers that the vast majority of migrants have no access to the welfare system and that the plan would hit people who have worked and paid taxes for decades.
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Euronews · Monday, 17 August 2026
The European Commission wants to use electricity market legislation to tax electricity at a lower rate than natural gas, to make electrification financially attractive as part of the EU's target of 46 percent electrification by 2040; electricity today costs three to five times more than gas across the union. Germany's finance ministry objects that tax matters require unanimity and that the Commission is circumventing this by going through market rules: director general Bastian Fleig sees "significant doubts" that the proposal can be adopted by qualified majority and calls it a direct interference with national tax and budgetary sovereignty. Negotiations between the member states and the parliament begin after the summer break under the Irish presidency.
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Euronews · Monday, 17 August 2026
The World
The sixty-day agreement signed on 17 June in Islamabad under Pakistani mediation expired on Monday without producing a final settlement. It effectively collapsed within a month, over vaguely worded commitments and the dispute about shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz: Trump declared it "over" as early as 7 July, and the Iranian foreign ministry's spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei says the United States' "gross and widespread violation" of the text meant negotiations never began. Nothing points to a revival; Pakistan keeps trying to restart direct contacts.
At an hourslong meeting on Monday, Donald Trump's envoy Jared Kushner and Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, according to a source familiar with the talks, that a US general should lead the oversight of Hamas's "demilitarization". The meeting came a day after Kushner's rare talks in Cairo with a Hamas delegation, alongside the Board of Peace's Gaza envoy Nickolay Mladenov, in an attempt to salvage the board's fifteen-point roadmap after Israel rejected it. Placing the disarmament question under an American lead is the first concrete outcome of the mediation round.
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NBC News · Monday, 17 August 2026
Two explosives-laden Hadid-110 drones, launched from Iranian territory shortly after midnight into Monday, hit prime minister Masrour Barzani's private office and the residence of the head of the Parastin intelligence agency in the Pirmam district near Erbil, causing no casualties. Barzani calls the attacks "reckless and unacceptable" and "a dangerous escalation and a direct threat to the security and stability of the Kurdistan Region". Tehran accuses the region of hosting Israeli intelligence networks and Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups, and has repeatedly struck targets there since the war began in late February.
Sweden
Sweden's Consulate General in Istanbul has a new Deputy Consul General: Matilda Lindén, one of the Swedish foreign service's most brilliant diplomats, took up her post yesterday at Istiklal Caddesi 247. She arrives from a posting in Tunis. This paper, written each morning with its readers at the Consulate General in mind, wishes her a very warm welcome to Istanbul and every success in the new role.
About 850 people on Saturday sat Sweden's first citizenship test in civic knowledge at the Stockholmsmässan centre in Älvsjö, a consequence of the tightened language and civics requirements that have applied to citizenship since 6 June. Several test-takers tell The Local that questions covered material absent from the official study booklet and that the vocabulary sat above the required language level, such as nederbörd (precipitation) instead of regn (rain). No pass mark exists yet: the Council for Higher Education will set it this autumn based on the outcome, results arrive in October, and anyone who fails may retake the test.
Ahead of the 13 September election, about 6.5 million voters are for the first time receiving their voting card in a digital mailbox, while roughly two million without one still get it on paper; the dispatch runs from 15 to 26 August, when early voting begins. Also new is that the voting card is no longer needed to vote: valid identification suffices, both at early voting locations and at the polling station on election day. According to the Election Authority, digital handling improves both production security and voters' access to their cards.