Turkey

SunExpress, a joint venture company of Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, will increase the number of its flights to 700 a week this season, said Paul Schwaiger, the company's managing director, at a press conference held in Antalya June 23. 

"Our company has carried more than 63 million passengers since the date we were established 25 years ago.

Only a few days after a flight attendant died of malaria in Istanbul, a fellow cabin attendant is being treated for the same disease in the western province of Afyonkarahisar. It is suspected that both caught the virus during a flight to Nigeria. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an?s press office has categorically denied claims about the extravagant cost of an iftar dinner where the head of the state hosted former and incumbent officials from Turkey?s Directorate General of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), suggesting that such claims were aspects of ?black propaganda.?

Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP) has nominated its former chair Deniz Baykal as its candidate for the parliamentary speaker's position, while the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has picked Ekmeleddin ?hsano?lu, former head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

A 19-year-old Turkish talent show contestant is out of a coma and communicating after she was shot in the head in an attack that shocked the country, doctors said on June 23.

Mutlu Kaya was shot while she was at home in Kurdish-majority southeastern Diyarbak?r province in May and had until now been in intensive care in the Diyarbak?r hospital where she is being treated.    

The two parties which received the most votes in the June 7 parliamentary election among the four political parties that made their way to the national assembly have been mulling how to get their candidate elected as parliament speaker in case of an eventual disagreement on the formation of a coalition government.

The People?s Protection Units (YPG), the military wing of Syria?s Democratic Union Party (PYD), have no intention of creating a ?Kurdish corridor? that would supposedly lay the ground for the foundation of an independent Kurdish state, PYD leader Salih Muslim has stated.

The two parties which received the most votes in the June 7 parliamentary election among the four political parties that made their way to the national assembly have been mulling how to get their candidate elected as parliament speaker in case of an eventual disagreement on the formation of a coalition government.

A number of members of Turkey?s Exporters Assembly?s (T?M) top management asked Reza Zarrab, who was embroiled in the huge corruption scandal of December 2013, to not attend a recent award ceremony in order to avoid any negative comments from the public, a source close to the matter has told daily Hürriyet. 

As the new Turkish parliament convenes on June 23, the chances are getting high for the formation of a grand coalition in Turkey, since no party gained the necessary majority to form a single party government in the June 7 election.