Istanbul

Members of Los Angeles' vast Armenian American community gathered outside the Turkish Consulate on Saturday to condemn the killing of prominent newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was shot Friday on a downtown street in Istanbul after repeated run-ins with Turkish authorities. Dink, who ran Turkey's only Armenian-language newspaper, clashed with Turkish officials over the government's denial of the Armenian genocide, the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey starting in 1915.

In the largest protest yet against the impending arrival here of Pope Benedict XVI, more than 20,000 Turks filled a town square Sunday to denounce the visit as an affront to Islam. Emotions are running high in this predominantly Muslim nation over a speech the pope made in September that was widely construed throughout the Islamic world as an insult to the Muslim faith and the prophet Muhammad, on whose teachings it is based.

If Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein had followed their original plans for a Broadway musical about class conflicts on the streets of New York, its title would have been "East Side Story." However they moved in the opposite direction, so that title belongs to the problematic full-evening dance drama by choreographer Aysun Aslan and composer Fahir Atakoglu that the Istanbul National Ballet offered in the second of two performances Friday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

TRAVEL and history writer Jason Goodwin examined the Ottoman Empire in 1999's "Lords of the Horizons" and experienced modern-day Byzantium in 2003's "On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul." His latest, "The Janissary Tree," explores the empire's declining years, but this time he blends mystery with historical fiction.

A fire engulfed the cargo area at Istanbul's airport Wednesday, causing millions of dollars in damage and injuring three people at a major hub for travel to the Middle East and Central Asia. An extremist Kurdish faction claimed responsibility for the fire, saying it was in retaliation for Turkey's "continued annihilation of the Kurdish people." But officials discounted terrorism as the cause of the fire, saying it was probably sparked by a short circuit or a welder's torch.

A group of men stopped a passenger bus and tossed gasoline bombs at it, causing the vehicle to careen into pedestrians, killing three, in Turkey's largest city Sunday as pro-Kurdish riots continued to spread. In the country's heavily Kurdish southeast, a pro-Kurdish demonstrator was killed, and local officials blamed police for his death. Clashes between Kurdish demonstrators and security forces have spread from the southeast to Istanbul, which has a large Kurdish population.

A Syrian was charged with masterminding suicide bombings in 2003 that killed 58 people in Istanbul, and Turkish prosecutors claimed that Osama bin Laden personally ordered him to carry out attacks. Loai Mohammed Haj Bakr Saqa, 32, was accused of serving as a point man between Al Qaeda and homegrown militants behind the series of suicide bombings in Istanbul in 2003, said the indictment. It said Saqa had given the militants in Turkey about $170,000.

IN the lobby of Istanbul's gleaming new modern art museum hang four plaques recording congratulations from Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder along with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That European leaders should acknowledge a faraway museum inauguration was no accident. The opening was speeded up, from March 2005 to December 2004, to coincide with a historic European Union summit in Brussels that agreed to open membership negotiations with Turkey.

AFTER having published five novels in 20 years, the versatile Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk now presents "Istanbul: Memories and the City," an engaging if curious grab bag of a book that is partly a memoir and partly a portrait of the place he has lived all his 50 years.

A bomb exploded at a cafe in Istanbul frequented by tourists, injuring two people, police said. A Dutch citizen and a Turkish employee were hurt, the Anatolian news agency reported. Police suspected Kurdish rebels were responsible for the attack. Meanwhile, the Sirnak governor's office in southeastern Turkey said government forces had killed five Kurdish rebels in a gun battle. The violence Thursday brought to 15 the number of rebels killed in the last 10 days.