Mansur Yavaş, the opposition CHP mayor of Ankara, said his meeting with President Erdoğan at the presidential complex on Wednesday was solely about the capital's stalled infrastructure projects, after the encounter fuelled speculation he might defect to the ruling party. Yavaş said interim CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Özgür Özel, who split from the party in July to found a rival New Party, were both told in advance.
The Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye kept its one-week repo rate at 37% on Thursday for a fifth straight meeting, citing the risk that Middle East-driven oil prices pose to disinflation even as the underlying trend eases. The interest rate corridor stayed at 35.5% to 40%.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis will spend the weekend on Kastellorizo, a Greek island roughly a nautical mile off Türkiye's coast, for ceremonies marking its 1943 liberation on September 13. The visit follows a week of sharp rhetoric: Erdoğan warned Greece this week to stop arming islands Ankara considers demilitarised under postwar treaties, saying Athens should "learn from the past." The trip comes a day after Greek and Turkish media traded accusations over Türkiye's new marine parks around other Aegean islands.
The European Central Bank raised its deposit rate a quarter point to 2.5% on Thursday, its second hike since June, after euro area inflation hit 3.3% in August on energy costs pushed up by the Middle East war, with Brent crude above $100 a barrel. Core inflation, excluding energy, held at 2.4%, and the ECB said the conflict "continues to generate inflation pressures" that are likely to persist.
Britain, Norway and the United States tracked and turned back Russian submarines that had been rehearsing how to disable undersea cables in Arctic waters near Norway's Svalbard archipelago earlier this year, the three countries said this week. Norwegian defence minister Tore Sandvik said Russia had been told plainly that "any attempt to target our critical infrastructure will be detected and met with consequences," after the Russian GUGI-directorate submarines were forced to abandon the exercise.
Morocco's foreign ministry on Thursday rejected accusations from Spanish opposition parties that Rabat orchestrated or enabled July's crisis, when more than 72,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and dozens died by drowning. The ministry asked why Morocco kept facing accusations "when no evidence, facts, or reports" establish its involvement, after Spain declassified intelligence this week describing Moroccan authorities as "negligent and passive" rather than complicit.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard said this week it struck US Navy vessels, oil tankers and other ships in the Strait of Hormuz, including an uncrewed American 'Saildrone' vessel on Thursday, in what Reuters called the largest declared wave of tit-for-tat shipping attacks since the war began. US Central Command denied any American vessel was hit in this week's exchanges and said the attempts failed, while Britain's maritime monitor UKMTO reported several commercial ships struck by gunfire in the Gulf of Oman and northern Gulf.
Houthi forces captured the strategic Red Sea port of Mocha on Thursday, advancing on the Bab al-Mandeb strait after Yemen's government ordered a "tactical withdrawal," said Tariq Saleh, a member of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council. The council's head, Rashad al-Alimi, warned the strait "cannot become another Strait of Hormuz" and urged international intervention, as UN envoy Hans Grundberg said Yemen faces its gravest risk of full-scale war since the 2022 truce.
Washington and Beijing are discussing reciprocal cuts on tariffs covering $30 billion of goods each before Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet in Washington on September 24, their third meeting in a year, though the two sides have not agreed on the scope. China's commerce ministry said it hopes for a deal "at an early date," with the current tariff truce due to expire on November 10.
The Migration Court in Malmö, seen as one of the country's most influential migration courts, rejected a man's appeal in the Malmö court's first ruling on the question: he had applied for citizenship in 2025 after living in Sweden since 2019, but was refused on June 9, 2026, three days after the new eight-year residency requirement took effect. Judge Fredrik Löndahl wrote that legislative intent carries substantial weight where no transitional provisions exist, and judge Annika Friberg that neither Swedish nor EU law bars applying the new requirement retroactively; according to the Fair Transition campaign, the Gothenburg migration court had already rejected several similar appeals before this one.
In the final major televised debate in Gävle on Wednesday, two days before Sunday's September 13 election, the tone hardened between Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and the Social Democrats' Magdalena Andersson over "mängdrabatten," the discount that reduces sentences for multiple offences. Andersson called a letter Kristersson sent her ahead of the debate "unworthy of a Swedish prime minister" and said he had "chosen political conflict instead of taking the side of crime victims," after he circulated a photo of her voting against the government's August proposal to abolish the discount entirely; the Social Democrats instead want it scrapped for sexual and serious violent offences by 2027, a plan Kristersson has dismissed as unrealistic and unfunded.