ISTANBUL (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of Turkish women face a daily ordeal of abuse and violence and the government is not doing enough to protect them, Amnesty International said in a damning report published yesterday. “Hundred of thousands of women are beaten, raped, verbally or physically assaulted, pushed to suicide or killed... by their fathers, brothers or sons,” the rights group’s representative Christina Curry told reporters. Curry is responsible for a report which alleged that “at least a third and up to a half of all women in the country are estimated to be victims of physical violence within their families.”

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey yesterday said there was no change in its ties with chief regional ally Israel despite a war of words over the Jewish state’s bloody operations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “There is no change in Turkey’s policy toward Israel. Bilateral relations are continuing in their own dynamics,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Namik Tan told a press conference.

Bulgaria is ready to boost the number of its peacekeepers in Afghanistan as requested by NATO, but needs financial backing for such a move, Defense Minister Nikolai Svinarov said yesterday. “I hope NATO would provide some of the funds necessary for our additional deployment in Afghanistan,” Svinarov told private Darik radio. (AP)

Albanian authorities in Kosovo have started reconstruction of a Serb village completely destroyed in mid-March violence launched by extremist Albanians. The Albanian-led authorities in the Serbian province promised an 11-million-dollar aid package to repair the houses and help returning Serbs who had fled the violence. The reconstruction of the village Svinjare should end by mid-October at the latest. (AFP)

Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz and a former economy minister should stand trial for fraud over a bank privatization scandal in which the mafia was allegedly involved, a parliamentary commission recommended yesterday. Parliament will now set a date to debate the commission report on the Turkbank affair, after which it will vote on whether to send Yilmaz and Gunes Taner to court. (AFP)

Masked men armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers displayed two alleged truckdrivers, said to be a Turk and an Egyptian, who were reportedly kidnapped in Iraq, in a videotape obtained yesterday by AP. The men said the drivers were delivering supplies from Kuwait and were seized because they were working for US occupation forces. (AP)