ANKARA (AP) – Turkey’s foreign minister flew to the United States yesterday for a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Abdullah Gul’s trip is aimed at establishing common ground between the two NATO allies on subjects including the Iraq war and the fight against Kurdish rebels. During his meeting with Rice scheduled for tomorrow, Gul is also expected to ask the US administration to block a resolution, introduced in January by Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to urge the US government to recognize as genocide the mass killings of Armenians at the end of World War I.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish police have detained eight people suspected of spreading propaganda for Hezbollah, a violent Turkish Islamist group active mainly in the 1990s, security officials said yesterday. The eight held in the past few days in the southern province of Adana were suspected of spreading propaganda for Hezbollah at meetings of a legal but shadowy Islamic group, the Mustazaflar Association. Hezbollah, which wants to replace Turkey’s secular order with a state based on Islamic sharia law, emerged in southeast Turkey in the late 1980s during fighting between Kurdish separatist guerrillas and Turkish troops. The group, not believed to be linked to the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, killed scores of people, mainly Kurdish rebel sympathizers.

A Turkish cargo plane flew directly from China to northern Cyprus, apparently breaking a ban on direct trade with the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus, the Turkish-Cypriot finance minister said in remarks quoted by Turkey’s Dogan news agency on Saturday. The cargo plane that reportedly landed Saturday was operated by the Turkish cargo company MNG and was carrying light bulbs from Shanghai, Dogan said. “It was a direct flight. It took off in Shanghai and came to our country,” Dogan quoted Ahmet Uzun, the Turkish-Cypriot finance minister, as saying. (AP)

Romania’s foreign minister confirmed yesterday that he was resigning, speaking in public for the first time after the prime minister called for him to step down. Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, speaking at a news conference in Bucharest after cutting short his vacation in Austria to return home over the weekend, said he would submit his letter of resignation today. Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu on Friday demanded Ungureanu resign after the Foreign Ministry failed to inform the premier that two Romanian workers had been detained by coalition forces in Iraq. (AP)