Month: August 2018

An old-time propeller plane crashed near-vertically at high speed into a Swiss mountain, killing all 20 people on board, police said Sunday.

The Junkers Ju-52 plane, operated by the Swiss company Ju-Air, went down Saturday on the Piz Segnas mountain above the Alpine resort of Flims, striking the mountain’s western flank about 2,540 meters (8,330 feet) above sea level. The mountainous area in southeastern Switzerland is popular with hikers and skiers and includes a glacier.

Police said Sunday they have now determined that all 20 people on board the plane, including its three crew members, died.

Eleven men and nine women between the ages of 42 and 84 were killed. Most of the victims were Swiss but they also included a couple and their son from Austria.

Photos released by Graubuenden canton (state) police showed the crumpled wreckage of the plane lying on the mountain, with only the upside-down tail more or less intact.

Police said they are not aware of any distress call from the aircraft before it crashed.

Daniel Knecht of the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board said the plane appears to have hit the ground near-vertically and at high speed.

Speaking Sunday at a news conference in Flims, he said the vintage plane presumably didn’t have the crash-resistant cockpit voice and data recorders that more modern aircraft have.

Officials can essentially rule out a collision with another aircraft or hitting an obstacle such as a wire, and there’s no indication of foul play or that the aircraft lost parts or broke up before the crash, he added.

He said that officials expect the investigation of the cause to be “relatively complex.”

The plane was flying the passengers back from a two-day trip to Locarno in southern Switzerland to its base at Duebendorf, near Zurich. Authorities were informed of the crash at 5 p.m. Saturday, 50 minutes after the aircraft had taken off from Locarno’s Magadino airfield.

Nearly 5,000 Ju-52 planes, a product of Germany’s Junkers, were manufactured between 1932 and 1952.

Ju-Air’s Ju-52 planes are former Swiss military aircraft, built in 1939, that were retired by the air force in 1981.

Ju-Air started operating flights with the old-timers in 1983, and the plane that crashed – with the registration HB-HOT – had been in service with the company since 1985.

The aircraft have three engines, one on the nose and one on each wing.

The company, which operates two other Ju-52s, suspended flights until further notice after the crash.
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Croatia is celebrating a victorious 1995 military offensive in which it retook lands held by rebel Serbs, but which Serbia’s president has compared to the policies of Nazi Germany during World War II.

The starkly conflicting views by the two main Balkan rivals of the August 1995 military blitz that resulted in an exodus of more than 200,000 minority Serbs from Croatia illustrates the persisting divisions in the region stemming from the 1990s’ war.

While Croatia on Sunday hailed the offensive as a flawless military victory that reunited the country’s territory and ended the war, neighboring Serbia mourned the hundreds of victims killed during the attack.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told a gathering late Saturday that “Hitler wanted a world without Jews; Croatia and its policy wanted a Croatia without Serbs.”

 
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The bodies of three Russian journalists who were killed in Central African Republic have been brought back to Moscow, where they are to undergo a forensic examination.

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said Sunday the bodies had been turned over to committee experts and would be examined “with the goal of establishing the cause of the Russians’ death.”

The journalists were ambushed and killed Monday outside the town of Sibut. They were investigating a Russian private security company that was operating in CAR as well as Russian ties to the local mining industry. The project was funded by exiled opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a longtime foe of President Vladimir Putin.

Officials in CAR say the journalists were kidnapped by men wearing turbans and speaking Arabic. Their bodies had gunshot wounds.

 
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Lisbon has broken a 37-year-old record to notch its highest temperature ever as an unrelenting wave of heat bakes Portugal and neighboring Spain.

Portugal’s weather service said the capital reached 44 degrees Celsius (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit) Saturday, surpassing the city’s previous record of 43 C (109.4 F) set in 1981.

The day’s highest temperature of 46.8 C (116.2 F) was recorded at Alvega in the center of Portugal. The country’s highest temperature on record is 47.4 C (117.3 F) from 2003.

The hot, dusty conditions across the Iberian Peninsula are the result of a mass of hot air from Africa.

Sunday’s forecast calls for temperatures to dip slightly while remaining extremely high.
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Israel’s navy Saturday seized a Swedish-flagged sailboat carrying activist passengers that was trying to breach the long-standing blockade of the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military said the vessel, named “Freedom for Gaza,” was “intercepted in accordance with international law.”

The 12 passengers, from Sweden, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Spain, are in custody and will be flown home, an Israeli Immigration Authority spokeswoman said.

The organizer of the trip, the Swedish group Ship to Gaza, said the boat was carrying mainly medical supplies and maintained it was wrongly intercepted in international waters.  

“The demands of the Ship to Gaza are that the ship with its crew and cargo … be allowed to go in peace through international and Palestinian waters in accordance with international law,” it said in a statement. “This is a demand that the 11 years-long illegal and destructive blockade on Gaza will be lifted at last.”

Israel’s military said the boat violated the “legal naval blockade” and that “any humanitarian merchandise can be transferred to Gaza through the Port of Ashdod.”

The vessel Freedom for Gaza was the second vessel of the “Freedom Flotilla” to be seized as it tried to “break the blockade” on Gaza, organizers said.

Earlier this week the Israeli navy intercepted a Norwegian-flagged activist boat, one of four that left Scandinavia in mid-May.

Israel contends the the blockade is necessary to keep Palestinian militants from getting weapons or other materials that could be used for military purposes.

Israel and Palestinian militants have fought three wars since 2008 in Gaza, an economically disadvantaged 365 square kilometer territory where more than two million Palestinians reside.

United Nations officials have called for the lifting of the blockade, citing worsening humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian enclave.
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Despite a sharp deterioration in relations over the detention of an American pastor, the United States and Turkey remain valued partners, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Saturday, in an apparent bid to ease tensions that have rocked ties between the NATO allies.

Pompeo told reporters on the sidelines of an Asian security forum in Singapore that the two countries would continue to work with each other in the framework of the alliance and on other matters.

“Turkey is a NATO partner with whom the United States has every intention of continuing to work cooperatively,” Pompeo said.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration took the rare, if not unprecedented, step of hitting two senior Turkish officials with sanctions over the case of Pastor Andrew Brunson, who remains in detention despite repeated demands from President Donald Trump for his release. Pompeo met on Friday with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to discuss the matter behind closed doors and said those talks had been “constructive.”

“I made clear that it is well past time that Pastor Brunson be freed and be permitted to return to the United States,” he said, adding that several detained local State Department employees should also be released. “I am hopeful that in the coming days we will see that occur,” Pompeo said.

He acknowledged “lots of challenges” with Turkey, but said Washington and Ankara had been able to work closely and well together. They have been at odds over numerous matters, including military activity in northern Syria and Turkey’s plans to purchase an advanced air defense system from Russia.

Speaking to Turkish journalists after his meeting with Pompeo, Cavusoglu also described their discussion as “extremely constructive” and said the two would continue to work toward resolving disputes. But he said threats would not work. “We repeated to them that nothing can be achieved through threatening language and sanctions and we believe that this was well understood,” he said.

Brunson, 50, is being tried on espionage and terror-related charges, which he and the U.S. government vehemently deny. He was arrested in December 2016 following a failed coup on charges of “committing crimes on behalf of terror groups without being a member” and espionage. Although he was released to home detention, he faces a prison sentence of up to 35 years if he is convicted on both counts at the end of his ongoing trial. The evangelical pastor, who is originally from Black Mountain, North Carolina, has lived in Turkey for 23 years and led the Izmir Resurrection Church.

Last week, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence threatened to impose sanctions on Turkey if Brunson was not immediately released. They said his recent transfer from prison to house arrest was not enough and on Wednesday, the Treasury Department hit Turkey’s Justice Minister, Abdulhamit Gul, and Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, with sanctions that block any assets they may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them..

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rejected the U.S. demands, saying his government won’t back down and is willing to “go its own way” if the U.S. acted. The Turks have also vowed to retaliate for the sanctions “without delay.”

The Turkish leader has previously connected Brunson’s return to the U.S. to the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania. Ankara blames Gulen for the coup attempt, while the cleric denies involvement.

 
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A Russian helicopter crashed shortly after takeoff in Siberia on Saturday, killing all 18 people aboard.

The Interstate Aviation Committee, which oversees civil aviation in much of the former Soviet Union, said the Mi-8 helicopter collided with the load being carried by another helicopter that had taken off from the same pad in Vankor, above the Arctic Circle about 2,600 kilometers (1600 miles) northeast of Moscow. The second helicopter was undamaged and landed safely, the committee said.

Helicopters frequently carry loads in slings that hang below the craft.

There were 15 passengers and three crew aboard the crashed helicopter, said a statement from the operator, UTair airlines.

Russian news reports said all the passengers were believed to have been working for a subsidiary of the state oil company Rosneft.

UTair, one of Russia’s largest airlines, operates an extensive fleet of helicopters serving Siberian oil fields as well as fixed-wing flights within Russia and to international destinations, mostly in former Soviet republics.

The helicopter that crashed was manufactured in 2010 and the pilot had nearly 6,000 hours of experience, including 2,300 as a captain, the UTair statement said.

Russian air safety has improved since the 1990s, when poor aircraft maintenance, pilot training and official oversight in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a high crash incidence.

In February, a Saratov Airlines An-148 regional jet crashed about six minutes after takeoff from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, killing all 71 people aboard. Investigators said the crew had failed to turn on a heating unit, resulting in flawed airspeed readings. A UTair ATR 72 crashed in Siberia in 2012, killing 33 of the 43 people aboard, after failing to be de-iced before takeoff.

 
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Greek Civil Protection Minister Nikos Toskas resigned on Friday in the wake of a wildfire last month that killed 88 people and led to widespread criticism of the government for its handling of the disaster.

Toskas had previously offered to quit after the July 23 blaze in the small seaside town of Mati east of Athens, but Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras refused to accept his resignation.

The minister reiterated his desire to step aside again on Friday during a meeting with Tsipras, in a move that the main political opposition said came too late to appease the public.

“This natural disaster, and the loss of so many people in Mati, overwhelms my desire to continue. This is something I had stated publicly from the first moment,” Toskas, a retired army general, said in a statement.

Pressure has been growing on the government, which is trailing the conservative opposition in opinion polls, at a time when it had hoped to extricate Greece from years of bailouts prompted by its debt crisis and reap the political benefits.

There have been recriminations over what went wrong and led to the deaths of dozens in Mati, where hundreds of people were trapped by towering walls of flames when they tried to flee.

Many jumped into the sea to survive but others died, either in their cars or when they were cornered on the edge of steep cliffs by the rapidly advancing inferno.

Last Friday Tsipras said he took political responsibility for the deadly wildfire amid accusations that his government had failed to protect lives and to apologize for the disaster.

Seeking to deflect public anger, he told his ministers he was conflicted over whether the authorities had done everything right in response to the disaster.

“Responsibilities have a name: Alexis Tsipras. He and his government do not have the courage to assume them 11 days after the tragedy,” the conservative New Democracy party said after the minister’s resignation.

Tsipras’s office quickly responded, accusing the conservative party of trying to score political gains from a national tragedy.

The death toll rose to 88 on Friday when a 35-year-old woman died from her injuries. Her six-month old baby, the youngest victim, had died in her arms from smoke inhalation as they tried to escape the flames.

Greek authorities say they suspect the fire was set deliberately. Arson is thought to be a frequent cause of forest fires in Greece, a crude method to clear the way for potential development.

Toskas’s duties have been assigned to Panos Skourletis, the country’s interior minister.
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Preparations are being made to send thousands of Ebola vaccines next week to North Kivu, the site of the latest outbreak of this deadly disease.

The World Health Organization says it foresees huge difficulties ahead in efforts to combat the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

North Kivu province, the site of the new outbreak, has been riven with ethnic and political clashes for at least two decades.

WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, said the operation getting under way in North Kivu will be much more difficult and complex than past Ebola response efforts.

Salama was at the forefront of efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak this April in the DRC’s Equateur Province.

“On the scale of degree of difficulty, trying to extinguish an outbreak of a deadly high-threat pathogen in a war zone reaches the top of any of our scales,” he cautioned.

WHO reports four of six suspected cases of Ebola have been confirmed in and around Mangina, a town of about 60,000 people in North Kivu. Around 20 deaths have been reported. Salama, however, said the deaths have not yet been confirmed as Ebola cases.

He said laboratory tests indicate that this particular strain is Ebola Zaire, the same one as in Equateur Province. He added that more information will be forthcoming Tuesday when genetic sequencing results are known.

If confirmed, he said it will be possible to use the same vaccine that was used in Equateur. He told VOA that preparations are under way to deploy vaccines to the affected area next week.

The bad news, he cautioned, is that the Zaire strain carries the highest case fatality rate of any of the strains of Ebola — 50 percent or higher.

“The good news is that we do have, although it is still an investigational product, a safe and effective vaccine that we were able to deploy last time around,” he said. “But, remember last time around — and this is a critical point — we had really large-scale access despite all the logistical constraints to be able to do the contact tracing.”

Salama said security constraints will make moving around in North Kivu far more difficult. He said 3,000 doses of the vaccine that are in the capital, Kinshasa, can be deployed immediately and 300,000 additional doses can be mobilized at very short notice.

Ebola is a constant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the virus thrives in heavily forested areas. The newest outbreak is the 10th since the first one was discovered in 1976.
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U.S. firm Best Western Hotels & Resorts, the last Western hotel chain still in Crimea, has pulled out because of sanctions imposed after Russia

annexed the region from Ukraine, two hotel employees said.

“The Best Western Sevastopol Hotel,” a Soviet-era building on the quayside in the port of Sevastopol was one of the few visible signs of an international business presence left since the 2014 annexation. Other major brands, among them McDonald’s Corp and Radisson Hotels have already quit Crimea.

The hotel is still running but branding identifying it as a Best Western hotel has been removed from the building and is now identifying itself on booking sites under the name “Sevastopol Hotel and Spa.”

The ending of Best Western’s presence this year shows that, even four years after the sanctions were first imposed by the United States and the European Union, they are still forcing Western investors out of Crimea.

The sanctions bar U.S. companies from operating in Crimea and prohibit new investment in Crimea. They block business with a long list of Crimean individuals and entities and make it impossible for Western firms to move money through Crimean banks.

The general director of the hotel declined to comment. Best Western, which has its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, declined to comment, and referred questions to the hotel’s owner or operator.

The majority owner of the hotel is a company called Sevastopol Investment Group Ltd, which is registered in the Seychelles, according to Russian tax service records. Reuters was unable to seek comment from the Seychelles firm because no contact details were listed for it.

Best Western does not own or operate hotels itself but has a franchising system under which hotel owners or operators can pay for the right to use the company’s brand, marketing and support services.

A member of the staff at the hotel told Reuters the franchise agreement with Best Western ended in October last year because of the sanctions.

“Now we’re just called the Sevastopol Hotel,” said the employee, who wished to remain anonymous. “We stopped paying for the franchise.”

A second employee also told Reuters that the agreement with Best Western ended because of the sanctions. It was not clear, from the employees’ accounts, whether the deal was ended by Best Western, or at the initiative of the hotel’s owners, and it was not clear which aspect of the sanctions led to the agreement ending.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, still internationally recognized as part of Ukraine, prompted international condemnation and sanctions from the United States and European Union. Russia said it acted to protect Crimea’s Russian-speaking population, and that the majority of residents wanted the region to be part of Russia.

Since then, Crimea has seen an influx of Russian state investment. Pensions and public sector wages have gone up, and new infra-structure has been built. However, the private sector, which depends heavily on tourism, has suffered from the effects of the sanctions.
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Russia is allowing thousands of fresh North Korean laborers into the country and granting new work permits in potential violation of U.N. sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

More than 10,000 new North Korean workers have registered in Russia since September, the paper said, citing records from the Russian Interior Ministry.

Russia’s action potentially violates U.N. sanctions to reduce cash flows to North Korea and put pressure on Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, the Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.

Labor Ministry records obtained by the Journal showed that a minimum of 700 new work permits have been issued to North Koreans in Russia this year, the paper said.

U.N. officials are probing potential violations of the sanctions, which contain narrow exceptions, WSJ reported citing sources.

Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.

Russia ‘working against us’

“It’s absolutely clear that Russia needs to do more. Russia says it wants better relations with the United States, so Moscow should prove that by cooperating with us, not working against us, on this urgent threat to all nations,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters.

“It is estimated that North Korean laborers in Russia send between $150-$300 million annually to Pyongyang. Now is the time for Russia to take action: Moscow should immediately and fully implement all the U.N. sanctions that it has signed on to,” the State Department spokesperson said.

The labor prohibition is a part of a broader array of sanctions that are aimed at eliminating an important revenue stream for Kim Jong Un’s regime. Most of the money North Koreans earn abroad ends up in government coffers as workers toil in gruelling conditions, the Journal reported.

Humanitarian need

U.N. Humanitarian Chief Mark Lowcock visited Pyongyang last month and posted a video online outlining his observations. 

“One of the things we’ve seen is very clear evidence of humanitarian need here,” he said in the video, posted to his official Twitter account and the U.N. website.
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Kosovo’s president reiterated Thursday his idea of “a correction” of the border with Serbia, which is widely seen as essentially a territorial swap as part of a strategy to stabilize relations between both EU-aspirant nations.

“Kosovo’s border with Serbia needs to be redefined, or corrected,” President Hashim Thaci told VOA’s Albanian Service on Thursday, largely repeating comments he made online Wednesday.

Thaci was responding to an idea floated by some Serbian government officials that Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority but also a Serb minority, should be divided as a possible solution to settle a long-running dispute that is hindering both sides’ ambitions to join the European Union.

No divided Kosovo

Ostensibly dismissing the idea of a divided Kosovo along ethnic lines as unacceptable, Thaci instead proposed the concept of a “redefined” or “corrected” border with its Serbian neighbor to the north.

“It means that in the process of our future dialogue with Belgrade, we will work together with the international community to define the Kosovo-Serbia border,” he said. “I want to emphasize that Kosovo will not be divided; I want to forcefully stress it: Belgrade cannot bring to the table the division of Kosovo, a thing that they have asked for in the past.

“In the context of border correction, I met with the representatives of [Serbia’s] Presevo Valley, who want to have the right to join Kosovo,” he added. “I will officially present their request at the next round of talks with Belgrade.”

Thaci is to meet Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Brussels after the summer break under an EU-sponsored dialogue that has made little progress in normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina since it was launched in 2013.

Experts and former diplomats have warned that rethinking borders in the Balkans would pose a risk to the stability in a region still struggling to come to terms with the wars of the 1990s, which tore apart Yugoslavia in Europe’s deadliest post-World War II conflict.

A partition described

Although Thaci told VOA his idea would not amount to a land swap, Daniel Serwer, director of conflict management at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said what Thaci describes is nonetheless a partition, not a correction of borders.

“It’s a bad idea because it could be destabilizing for the Balkan region, [and it could] enhance political support for those inside Kosovo who oppose Kosovo statehood and want union with Albania,” Serwer, a former U.S. special envoy to the Balkans, told VOA.

“It could also hurt moderates in Serbia,” he added. “It would also have a bad impact more broadly than that, on Macedonia, on Bosnia and Herzegovina … and then you have Russian ambitions to control South Ossetia in Georgia and other territories, so it opens a Pandora(’s) box.”

It was earlier this week that some Serbian government officials informally broached the idea of a land swap based on geographic concentrations of ethnic Serb and Albanian minorities — Kosovo’s northern Mitrovica region for Serbia’s Presevo Valley — as a possible solution to the Kosovo issue.

“I did not talk about a land swap or division, I talked about correction of borders, and a solution can be reached if there is a will on both sides,” Thaci told VOA on Thursday. “Kosovo cannot join EU or NATO without an agreement with Serbia. Serbia, too, cannot join EU without the agreement with Kosovo.”

In 1999, NATO intervened to stop a bloody Serb crackdown on Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is recognized as a separate nation by more than 100 countries, but not by Serbia.

Tensions remain high after seven years of negotiations, even though the EU has made it clear to the governments in Pristina and Belgrade that they must normalize relations to advance toward membership in the bloc.

This story originated in VOA’s Albanian Service. Some information is from AP and Reuters.
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Ankara is vowing to hit back against Washington’s sanctions on the Turkish justice and interior ministers in connection with the detention of American protestant pastor Andrew Brunson.

Turkey Vice President Fuat Oktay threatened retaliation in a tweet Thursday, “We will not hesitate for a split second to do what great nations must do under the leadership of our president.” 

However, in a written statement, Berat Albayrak, the powerful economics minister, indicated a less confrontational approach.

“Our priority is to ensure that this process is settled through diplomacy and constructive efforts that would be consistent with the relations between the two allied countries sharing a strong historical background,” Albayrak said.

Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu were hit by financial and diplomatic measures Wednesday, for what Washington called their role in the unjust detention of Brunson.

The American pastor is on trial on terrorism and espionage charges for links to followers of U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is blamed by Ankara for the 2016 failed coup and whom Turkey is seeking to extradite.

Last month, in a move widely seen as a gesture to Washington, Brunson was moved to house arrest after nearly two years in jail. But U.S. President Donald Trump is demanding Brunson’s return to America. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists Brunson’s detention is a matter for the courts.

Washington accuses Ankara of hostage-taking, claiming the pastor’s detention is part of efforts to extract concessions over several disputes between the countries.

WATCH: Crisis Over Detained Pastor Deepens

News of U.S. sanctions saw Turkish financial markets falling, with the lira hitting record lows amid fears Washington could target Turkey’s fragile economy.

The U.S. Treasury is considering a significant fine against the Turkish state-controlled Halkbank for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. According to local and international reports, Ankara had pressed for a reduced penalty against Halkbank as part of a deal to release Brunson. Turkish officials have rejected the reports.

A fine is viewed as powerful leverage against Ankara. 

“Just float the news Halkbank is about to receive a major fine, the leak itself would cause such massive damage in Turkish markets,” political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners said, “which would reverberate in inflation, corporate balance sheets, etc., etc. I think we would have to hoist the white flag.”

But Ankara’s robust stand against Washington is playing well domestically.

In a rare display of political unity, the main opposition parties, except for the pro-Kurdish HDP, joined Erdogan’s ruling AKP Party in issuing a joint statement condemning Washington’s sanctions as “unacceptable and incompatible neither with principles of friendship, alliance, NATO membership,” read the statement.

The leader of the main opposition CHP Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, demanded retaliation. 

“In line with the reciprocity, we are expecting similar actions to be taken against U.S. ministers,” said Kilicdaroglu.

“The anti-Americanism in the past decade has hit a record high among all the social classes, and from all the political parties from left to right,” former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen said, “so there is no political bill to pay for the government to go against the United States.”

Despite such rhetoric and strong support for facing down Washington, analysts predict Ankara will likely have to step back. 

“Turkey has this unfortunate habit of political hostage taking. We’ve seen this before,” Yesilada said. “German national journalist Deniz Yucel comes to mind, who was jailed without charge for more than a year, to extract concessions from Germany. Germany did not relent. It put the word out, advising banks not to lend to Turkey. Within a few months, Yucel was in Frankfurt.”

But given the strong anti-American sentiment that reverberates among Erdogan’s electoral base, stepping back for the president is not predicted to be easy.

Diplomatic efforts are continuing between the NATO allies. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reportedly spoke Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The two men are expected to meet Friday on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting in Singapore.

“For Brunson, I would prefer not to overplay my hand and send him back immediately,” Selcen said. “From then on, there will be new paths to explore to put relations back on track. But it won’t be easy. I think Erdogan is strong enough to package this and sell this to his supporters.”

Erdogan has refrained mainly from speaking on the controversy and avoided directly criticizing Trump since the announcement of sanctions. The few comments the Turkish president has made over Brunson’s detention have been mostly restrained. 

Analysts suggest Ankara is likely to be looking for a face-saving exit strategy before irreparable damage is done to both U.S.-Turkish relations and the economy.
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Much of the Iberian Peninsula is experiencing the year’s first heatwave, with the mercury expected to soar before peaking at 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) in some areas of southern Portugal this weekend.

Authorities say temperatures are being driven higher Thursday by a hot air mass moving northward from Africa.

Forecasts are for a high of 44 degrees (111 Fahrenheit) in the Portuguese city of Evora, 130 kilometers east of Lisbon, and the Spanish province of Badajoz across the border.

Portuguese authorities have issued a nationwide health warning, while warnings have also been issued for 40 of Spain’s 50 provinces.

The Portuguese town of Beja is expected to record a peak of 47 degrees on Saturday.

Spain’s Meteorological Agency says thermometers are expected to begin dropping that day.
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