A Pakistan International Airlines spokesman told journalists a “hoax” forced an unscheduled landing in Istanbul, after a passenger on board was thought to be carrying a bomb.
Turkey has said it is expelling top-level Israeli diplomats in protest at the Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound ship that killed nine Turks. The UN report found the raid legal but excessive.
Two women from Northern Ireland who were stabbed to death in Turkey have been named.
A tour operator offering flights and packages to Turkey goes into administration following financial difficulties, leaving 12,800 UK holidaymakers abroad.
Turkey must tighten its border controls if it is to become a member of the European Union, MPS have warned, saying failure to do so would lead to a mass influx of illegal migrants.
The United Nations has condemned Israel’s military intervention to stop a convoy that was trying to break the country’s blockade of Gaza.
A couple of years ago I took tea with a man called Ahmet Davutoglu in a Piccadilly hotel. Back then he was foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s prime minister. Now he’s foreign minister and probably the most important and pro-active Turk in the role in almost two decades. After last week’s attack by Israeli…
Lindsey Hilsum blogs on Turkey’s strategy towards Israel and Hamas following last week’s killing of nine activists during the storming of an aid flotilla.
Jon Snow
US president Barack Obama heads for the Middle East and Europe this week. Having inaugurated his “opening” to the Muslim world during his inspired stop in Turkey on his first foreign foray, he heads for Egypt to make his keynote speech setting out his Middle East ambitions. The Turkey trip remains a touchstone of his…
Before Barack Obama swept into town, I spent an evening in an Istanbul hospital, visiting the bedside of an old friend. My friend is a true Levantine, perhaps one of the last; his forebears built railways for the Ottoman Sultans in the 19th Century, coming to what was then Constantinople from what was then the…
The images the President’s advisers hope will resonate most from his trip to Turkey are surely those from his tour of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. It was commissioned by an Ottoman Sultan, Ahmed 1st, who wanted to placate Allah almost 400 years ago. Now America’s President wants to do the same.
I had dinner at the home of a London art dealer last week and my eyes were on stalks. I counted two David Hockneys and a Magritte in his sitting room, a fabulous Lucian Freud drawing up the stairs, and two Walter Sickerts beside his bed. You might ask what I was doing in his bedroom; but…