Turkey elections will be President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's biggest test yet. Here's why the world is watching.
CBSN
Istanbul — Turkey will hold national elections on Sunday that look set to be the toughest test of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's long political career. After ruling the country for two decades, polls showed Erdogan neck-and-neck with rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the candidate fielded jointly by the opposition Nation's Alliance.
Erdogan was applauded during his first decade as leader for transforming Turkey into an economic and political success story, but over the last 10 years he's faced mounting criticism — both domestically and internationally — for quashing dissent and adopting rules and laws typical of autocratic regimes.
Once a poster child for developing nations, Turkey is also currently battling high inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, both of which are regularly blamed by opponents and economists on Erdogan's unorthodox economic policies.
Collville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France — The word "hero" is overused. But if not for the courage of the few remaining D-Day survivors and their friends who fell as they launched the fight to oust Adolf Hitler's Nazi German forces from France 80 years ago, there would have been no celebrations this week in Normandy.
France's domestic intelligence agency has detained a 26-year-old Russian-Ukrainian man on suspicion of planning a violent act after he injured himself in an explosion, prosecutors said on Wednesday. The news came hours before world leaders gathered in the nation to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy.
A British-Mexican man who says he was targeted for being gay and arrested on false drug charges in Qatar has been given a suspended six-month jail sentence, a fine amounting to about $2,700, and a deportation order by a court in the Arab nation, which is a vital U.S. ally in the Middle East, according to his family and Mexican officials.
An Israeli strike early Thursday on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory. The hospital treating victims said it had received the bodies of at least "37 martyrs" from the strike, according to Agence France-Presse. But a U.N. official tells the Reuters news agency the death toll is between 35 and 45, though it still can't confirm any numbers.
Jerusalem — Thousands of Israeli nationalists marched Wednesday through east Jerusalem as authorities deployed police with tensions sky-high nearly eight months into the Gaza war. That war appeared to be intensifying in Gaza and the far-right nationalists staged their annual march – long deemed a provocation by Palestinians – in Jerusalem.
The world has now marked one full year of back-to-back monthly heat records, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced on Wednesday. It said last month was the hottest May in recorded history — the 12th consecutive month in which the monthly high temperature record was broken.