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“Israel is in need of a country like Turkey in the region,” Erdogan said in remarks to Turkish reporters. —AFP/File ISTANBUL: Turkey must accept that it needs Israel, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday, as the two countries seek to thrash out a deal on normalising ties. Nato member Turkey was a key regional ally of Israel until the two countries fell out over the deadly storming by Israeli commandos in 2010 of a Turkish aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, bound for Gaza. Erdogan further raised hackles in Israel with his sometimes inflammatory rhetoric towards the Jewish State. But the atmosphere was transformed following the revelation last month the two sides were making progress in secret talks to seek a rapprochement. “Israel is in need of a country like Turkey in the region,” Erdogan said in remarks to Turkish reporters published in leading dailies Saturday. “And we too must accept that we need Israel. This is a reality in the region,” s

Zoha Waseem is a doctoral student at King’s College London and a senior editor for the Strife Blog. ZOHA WASEEM — UPDATED JUN 02, 2015 05:18PM  According to the big bang theory, the earth is 4.54 billion years old. Iceland, the youngest land mass to emerge out of the Atlantic Ocean floor, formed by volcanic eruptions, is between 16 and 20 million years old. This was not in my knowledge when I boarded the flight from London to Reykjavik. In fact, there was little apart from Iceland’s location on a world map that I knew prior to my departure – except that there are no McDonald’s or Starbucks in the entire country. Iceland’s landscape is dotted by volcanoes, glaciers, rivers, small villages and farms. I arrived at Reykjavik, the smallest big city or a big village depending on how you look at it, to a cold spring and endless daylight. Reykjavik, literally meaning the ‘smoky bay’ or ‘steamy bay’ (named after hot springs located around the city), is the world’s northernmost ca