Turkey's Jewish community is using the occasion of Ramadan to highlight unity with the Muslim faith by hosting an outdoor iftar (fast-breaking meal) at a synagogue in Edirne, reported the Daily Sabah on Friday. The feast was held outside the Great Edirne Synagogue, recently restored by the government, which stands in remembrance of the Jewish community that was forced from the city during the Thrace pogroms of the 1930s.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has become a leader nobody in the West is eager to host, has decided to steer toward countries with leaders he thinks might understand him: Uganda, Kenya and Somalia. [...] It's become a tradition for Erdogan to begin his foreign travels with much fanfare and overdone public relations campaigns.

As part of Cultural Diplomacy, the Pakistan Embassy in Ankara organized the Chughtai Art Awards competition in the Konya province. The thematic focus of the competition was “Mughal/Turkish Art & Architecture of Pakistan.” The event was organized in collaboration with the Konya branch of Turkey’s Ministry of National Education.

Seeing U.S. soldiers cooperate with the PKK's Syrian wing, the PYD, while the PKK was killing Turkish soldiers, will have serious long-term challenges for U.S. public diplomacy in Turkey

African countries, today, are exerting every effort to overcome the challenges they face with their own resources and through their one mechanisms. Turkey is an ardent supporter of African solutions for African issues. [...] Humanitarian diplomacy is one of the main components of Turkey’s approach towards Africa. Hosting the first-ever United Nations World Humanitarian Summit on 23-24 May is a clear sign of Turkey’s outstanding position in this field. 

States should use the increasing power of social media networks and work with them to achieve foreign policy objectives. [...] However, there is much more room for states to cooperate with social media rather than seeing it as an enemy. Instead, there are ample opportunities to use social media’s features, low costs and high effectiveness as tools to promote a state’s foreign policy objectives.

The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) may well be a signature initiative of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, designed to create for himself a dynamic, if not dubious, humanitarian legacy, but it could hardly have been more heartily welcomed than in Turkey, the country where the 2016 WHS will take place later this month.

In northern Syria, a small core of Irish aid workers are among the group of international aid agencies helping to lessen the load for Um Mohammad and more than a million people caught between the warring sides. Aileen Wynne (25), from Raheen in Limerick, who studied human nutrition at University College Cork, became an aid worker after travelling to India. She has spent 16 months working with Syrian refugees.