Passengers had been trapped in mid-air overnight after a pod hit a pole and burst open, killing one person and injuring others

The last 43 of 174 people stranded in cable cars high above a mountain in southern Turkey have been brought to safety, nearly 23 hours after one pod hit a pole and burst open , killing one person and injuring 10 when they plummeted to the rocks below.

The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, announced the successful completion of the rescue operation on X on Saturday afternoon.

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Nearly 200 stranded in midair after accident outside Turkish resort city of Antalya

One person has been killed, seven injured and nearly 200 stranded in midair when a pylon supporting cable cars collapsed outside the Turkish resort city of Antalya.

Helicopters equipped with night vision were called in to rescue 184 people still stranded in the cable car system’s cabins, Antalya mayor Muhittin Bocek said in a statement late on Friday.

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Groups monitoring organised crime warn Turkey is becoming entry point for drugs reaching Europe

Turkish police have seized the third largest haul of cocaine in the country’s history, the interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, has announced, as groups monitoring organised crime warned that Turkey was becoming an entry point for drugs reaching Europe.

Approximately 608kg of cocaine, most of it in liquid form, were confiscated in an operation across three provinces, Yerlikaya posted on X on Thursday. Nearly 830kg of precursor chemicals used to process the drug were also seized.

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Big opposition wins in last week’s elections, notable for a huge rise in female representatives, reasserted the country’s liberal, secular values

Turkey is a beautiful and complicated country that never ceases to bewilder not only international observers but also, at times, its own citizens. The results of local elections held last Sunday came as a surprise to many pollsters. The opposition won a spectacular victory , changing the political landscape and shifting the dominant narrative. It would be naive to assume that it signals the end of an era, but it sure feels like a new beginning.

For so long now, the opposition in Turkey has been demoralised, fractured and weak against an unbridled concentration of power and authority. The lack of checks and balances, the lack of freedom of speech, the lack of free media and the lack of the separation of powers – these all stacked the cards against anyone who dared to question the Justice and Development party (AKP) government and its religious-nationalist-populist ideology.

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The survival of ancient dialects matters not just for scholarship, but because of the wisdom they convey about how to live with nature

The launch of a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record a vanishing Greek dialect drew attention back this week to one of the great extinctions of the modern world: nine languages are believed to be disappearing every year. Romeyka, which is spoken by an ageing population of a few thousand people in the mountain villages near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, diverged from modern Greek thousands of years ago. It has no written form.

For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world, the loss of which would clearly be a blow. But some languages are in even bigger trouble, with 350 that have fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 that have just one. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints the situation in stark colours, with a language stripes chart, devised to illustrate the accelerating decline in each decade between 1700 and today. Its authors predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will be extinct by 2150. Even now, half of the people on the planet speak just 24 of them.

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French president marks 30th anniversary with video, airing Sunday, saying international community lacked will to stop the slaughter

The French president, Emmanuel Macron , has said France and its western and African allies “could have stopped” Rwanda ’s 1994 genocide but did not have the will to halt the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis.

In a video message to be published on Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide, Macron will emphasise that “when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsis began, the international community had the means to know and act”, the presidency said on Thursday.

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Romeyka descended from ancient Greek but may die out as it has no written form and is spoken by only a few thousand people

An endangered form of Greek that is spoken by only a few thousand people in remote mountain villages of northern Turkey has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world, after researchers identified characteristics that have more in common with the language of Homer than with modern Greek.

The precise number of speakers of Romeyka is hard to quantify. It has no written form, but has survived orally in the mountain villages around Trabzon, near the Black Sea coast.

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Venue was closed for renovations when fire broke out with victims believed to have been working in the building

A daytime fire at a central Istanbul nightclub that was closed for renovations has killed at least 29 people, as five people, including managers, were detained for questioning.

Firefighters and other first responders surrounded the charred and smoking entrance to the Masquerade nightclub, which occupies two floors underneath a 16-storey residential building in the Gayrettepe area of the Beşiktaş district on the European side of the Turkish city.

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A surprise set of results has given Turkey’s main opposition party a major boost and enhanced the prospects of democratic renewal

Less than a year ago, Turkey’s main opposition parties were in a slough of despond. Defying their predictions, the country’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, comfortably won a third term in presidential elections held last spring. At the same time, his Justice and Development party (AKP) emerged more powerful from a parliamentary poll, despite the economy tanking and dissatisfaction at the government’s response to the worst earthquake for decades. Years of clientelism, culture wars and overwhelming media dominance appeared to have rendered Mr Erdoğan’s strongman politics all but unassailable at national level.

Small wonder then, that a spectacular and unanticipated turnaround at Sunday’s local elections prompted wild celebrations into the early hours. In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, the incumbent mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu , trounced Mr Erdoğan’s candidate. Mr Imamoğlu’s Republican People’s party (CHP) also pulled off a clean sweep of other major cities, winning by a landslide in the capital, Ankara, and easily in Izmir. More suprisingly, the CHP managed to chalk up some victories in the conservative towns and villages that make up Mr Erdoğan’s electoral heartland in Anatolia, and near the Black Sea. Gains in those regions for the Islamic far‑right New Welfare party (YRP), at the AKP’s expense, added to the president’s misery.

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