Eurasia

MADRID – Turkey’s government may seek an extension of its parliamentary mandate to attack Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq when the current authorization expires in October, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.

ANKARA – Turkey plans to liberalize its media sector, allowing foreigners to own up to 50 percent of broadcasters instead of the current 25 percent, according to a draft law prepared by media watchdog RTUK and obtained by Reuters on Monday.

TBILISI – Around 35,000 people protested in the Georgian capital on Sunday against a presidential election they say leader Mikhail Saakashvili rigged.

TBILISI – Georgian prosecutors on Thursday charged opposition politician and tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, in self-imposed exile in Israel and Britain, with plotting a coup and attempting to organize a terrorist attack.

BRUSSELS – NATO and the European Union welcomed on Monday the conduct of Georgia’s election in which incumbent President Mikhail Saakashvili claimed victory, but demanded that allegations of irregularities be cleared up fast.

TBILISI – Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili is likely to scrape an election win on Saturday in a vote the West will scrutinize for fairness, but polls differ on whether his victory will be big enough to avoid a second round.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov won the December 23 national election, which was not unexpected. However, it is quite unusual that this will be his third term in office, despite the fact that the Uzbek Constitution limits presidents to two terms.  The Karimov administration made no attempt to amend the constitution …

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s parliament reconvened on Thursday a day after the opposition prevented the chamber from sitting, but there was no indication when it would reconsider a proposal to restore Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister.

KIEV (Reuters) – Yulia Tymoshenko, a leading force in Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution”, narrowly failed to win parliament’s backing to restore her as prime minister on Tuesday and accused her rivals of cheating.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul and his Turkmen counterpart Gurbangly Berdimuhamedov have agreed to make an extra effort to boost relatiosn betwene the two countries, they disclosed in a joint press conference on Thursday.