Türkiye's Defense Ministry said on Thursday that any deployment under the Mecca pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan requires parliamentary approval, with a vote expected later this month. Officials have said the assistance would be limited to defensive support such as air defense and logistics, not a large troop presence, as Saudi Arabia continues to face Houthi attacks.
Turkey's main opposition CHP is preparing a criminal complaint accusing Özgür Özel, who now leads the breakaway New Party (Yeni Parti), of forging lawmakers' signatures to redirect party membership fees into their personal accounts. CHP says an April 2026 letter carried 138 signatures but the attached bank account list covered only 100 lawmakers, and separately accuses the New Party's founders of taking party vehicles and equipment worth more than 250 million lira.
Nationalist MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli hosted CHP chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for a 15-minute meeting in parliament on Tuesday, their first substantive contact in years. It follows President Erdoğan's call this month for a 'grand Türkiye consensus' beyond simply opposing the government; a similar meeting between Bahçeli and Kurdish politicians two years ago opened the door to the ongoing peace process.
Türkiye's central government posted a 532-billion-lira deficit in September, with spending up 34 percent year-on-year against revenue growth of 23 percent, the Treasury and Finance Ministry said. For January-September the deficit reached 1.84 trillion lira, even as the primary balance, which excludes interest payments, stayed in surplus.
Syria's intelligence service detained Mihraç Ural, the chief suspect behind the 2013 car bombings in the Turkish border town of Reyhanlı that killed 53 people, as he tried to cross the border, state news agency SANA reported Thursday. Türkiye has sought Ural for over a decade.
EU leaders failed to agree on the bloc's 2028-2034 budget at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, after the Irish presidency's compromise, a 141-billion-euro cut, was largely rejected. Council President António Costa will now draft a new proposal; a special summit is set for 26 November, and the original end-of-2026 deadline is now in doubt.
The US Treasury extended a licence on Thursday letting Russian oil company Lukoil's service stations outside Russia, including in the US, keep operating until 24 April 2027. The move comes days after President Trump announced the deal, which lets Russian diesel reach Western markets; EU foreign ministers have criticized that deal as undermining unity against Moscow while the war on Ukraine continues.
The European Central Bank cleared Italian lender UniCredit on Thursday to raise its stake in Germany's Commerzbank above 30 percent with no upper limit. The remaining regulatory steps are expected to be completed toward the end of 2026, after which UniCredit would control roughly half of Commerzbank's voting rights, capping a multi-year push against German political resistance to the takeover.
A Khartoum-based rights group, Emergency Lawyers, says at least 72 gold miners were killed in an air strike on a mining site in the mountainous, undemarcated borderland between Sudan and Egypt. The group accuses the Egyptian military of targeting civilian miners; Egypt has not commented. An analyst later put the death toll at 85, calling it the second strike on the site.
Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores pleaded not guilty on Thursday to new charges of conspiring to commit torture, including against US citizens, US prosecutors said. The couple were taken from Caracas in a US military operation in January 2026, which Maduro has called a kidnapping, and already face charges of narco-terrorism and weapons possession. Their lawyers are seeking to have the case dismissed, arguing presidential and first-lady immunity.
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Israeli President Isaac Herzog that Israel should halt and reverse what he called the 'forced establishment' of settlements in the West Bank, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement issued Friday. The meeting took place in Baku on the sidelines of the CICA summit; Wang called the two-state solution the right path and urged full access to Gaza to prevent a spreading humanitarian catastrophe.
Sweden's parliament rejected Magdalena Andersson as prime minister on Thursday by 248 votes to 99, after the Left Party, the Centre Party and the Greens, the partners she needs for a majority, voted no alongside the Tidö bloc. Those same three parties now want Speaker Andreas Norlén to hand the next exploratory mandate to Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson instead, buying time to settle their own coalition terms. A fourth failed vote would force a new election.