Türkiye
Turkish commentary this week set the Denizkurdu-I naval exercise inside a wider list of grievances: Greece's purchase of an Israeli air-defence system, a new Cyprus electricity interconnector, fresh maritime-jurisdiction legislation, and a possible extension of Greek territorial waters to twelve nautical miles off Crete. Ankara points to a 1995 parliamentary resolution that treats any Greek waters extension past six nautical miles as grounds for war.
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Hürriyet · Saturday, 19 September 2026
Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said courts ordered 20 people jailed pending trial, four fund-management board officials and sixteen accused of panic-inducing social media posts, in two capital-markets manipulation probes; 51 more suspects were barred from leaving the country and 246 social media accounts were blocked by court order. “Those who exploit our citizens' hard-earned money, labour and savings will answer before the law,” Gürlek said. The case follows the investigation opened days earlier into a former exchange chief whose own public warning preceded a 6.6 percent stock plunge.
İzmir prosecutors, backed by intelligence and gendarmerie counterterrorism units, detained 21 people accused of sending money to people linked to the Gülen movement, out of 26 named in the warrants; five suspects remain sought. Investigators seized cash in several currencies and gold coins, and said several of those detained were elderly.
DEM Party co-chairs Tülay Hatimoğulları and Tuncer Bakırhan said progress on the Kurdish peace process now depends on reinstating elected co-mayors removed by government-appointed trustees, releasing imprisoned politicians including Abdullah Öcalan, and reopening space for the Kurdish language and Kurdish identity. Bakırhan said democracy has to begin at the local level. Legislative changes are reportedly expected in October or November.
Source:
The Week · Wednesday, 16 September 2026
A White House official told reporters no bilateral meeting between Presidents Trump and Erdoğan is currently on the schedule for next week's UN General Assembly session, a day after Daily Sabah reported, citing the US ambassador, that the two would meet in New York. The official said the schedule could still change and did not rule out an informal encounter.
Europe
NATO's chiefs of defence, meeting in Copenhagen, elected German General Carsten Breuer to chair the alliance's senior military advisory body from July 2027, choosing him over Canada's General Jennie Carignan. Breuer becomes chief military adviser to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, giving Germany one of NATO's two most senior military posts alongside the Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
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Euronews · Saturday, 19 September 2026
Aramco told European customers under long-term contracts they will receive no crude oil in October, after a drone attack, which Saudi Arabia says was launched from Iraq, knocked out the East-West pipeline, the same line already damaged in an earlier drone attack, feeding the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The outage removes four to five percent of global export capacity; Aramco expects a partial restart within days and full capacity within six weeks, and is using ship-to-ship transfers off Oman to soften the gap.
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Meduza · Friday, 18 September 2026
Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced Poland has joined the Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, founded in Paris in July by Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the UK, which is developing a Ukrainian-designed system called Freyja as a cheaper complement to Patriot batteries. Tusk called Poland's earlier absence a misunderstanding and said Warsaw has prepared a new, undisclosed military aid package for Ukraine.
Germany will cut the tax on petrol and diesel by about seventeen cents a litre from October to the end of the year, and is separately preparing the country's first fuel price cap, tied to the oil price, after pump prices hit a record 2.286 euros a litre this week. The tax cut lands on the same day, Sunday 20 September, that the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern hold elections, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU is expected to lose ground to the AfD.
Source:
France 24 · Saturday, 19 September 2026
The World
Yemen's Houthi movement, which calls itself Ansar Allah, fired a ballistic missile toward Riyadh before dawn on Saturday; a Saudi-led coalition spokesman said it was intercepted, and no casualties or damage were reported. It was the first air-raid alert sounded in the Saudi capital itself since the current round of fighting escalated in July, though the Houthis also attempted strikes on four other Saudi cities that were intercepted.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran has passed Washington three conditions to end the war through Qatari mediation: a halt to fighting on all fronts, release of frozen Iranian funds, and an end to the US naval blockade. He said Iran is awaiting a response from President Trump, but also warned Iran is prepared for what he called a decisive war and said it had recently test-fired a new multi-warhead anti-ship missile near a US vessel.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are set to meet Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in New York on 20 September, the final scheduled session before Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House on 24 September. The US Trade Representative's office said the talks will cover trade, rare earths and artificial intelligence, and will check on implementation of earlier commitments.
Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, said crude, cargo and LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks were the highest in six months, and that Gulf allies have moved more than a billion barrels of crude through the strait under US naval protection in the past two months. Cooper said Iran has exported no oil at all under what he called an ironclad blockade, a claim that goes further than the US Navy's own account two days earlier, an account independent ship-tracking data had already questioned.