Just weeks before general elections in Turkey, six leading members of an opposition party were forced to resign from Parliament on Saturday after sexually explicit videos of one of them were posted on the Internet.

The Web site that posted the videos had threatened to release others that it said showed the five other members who resigned.

The resignations could severely weaken the Nationalist Movement Party, the second largest opposition group in Parliament, which is struggling to win the minimum of 10 percent of the vote required to be seated in Parliament.

Four members of Parliament from the same party resigned earlier this month after similar videos were posted on the same Web site.

Turkey has denounced the U.S. president’s annual statement marking the deaths of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as “one-sided,” criticizing Barack Obama for issuing the remarks on Turkey’s National Sovereignty day.

"Obama's statement is one-sided and it reads history from a single perspective,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Sunday.

“I want to remind everyone that the statement was made on the same day that our nation was marking National Sovereignty day and the 91st anniversary of the national Parliament; it would be better if this had been noticed by the American side," the minister Sunday said in northwestern province of Çanakkale, where he was participating in a joint press conference with his New Zealand counterpart, Murray McCully, to mark the 96th anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign in World War I.

The U.S. president traditionally releases a statement on April 24, “Armenian Remembrance Day,” but Obama chose to issue his statement this year on April 23, which is marked as National Sovereignty and Children’s Day in Turkey.

The Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) celebrated the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Caucus on US-Turkish Relations and Turkish Americans with a lunch and an evening reception.
 
28 Members of Congress and nearly 300 congressional staffers attended the events, which were co-hosted by TCA with Caucus co-chairs Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN/9th), Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA/11th), Rep.Virginia Foxx (R-NC/5th) and Rep.Ed Whitfield (R-KY/1st). TCA was particularly honored to host Rep.Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL/18th), Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the event.
 
The lunch, held in the Cannon House Office Building, was overflowing for 2 hours, as Congressional Members and their staff stopped by to learn about Turkish-Americans, Turkish history and the importance of Turkey to the United States in foreign policy, business and other key issue areas.
 

Washington hosted two high-level Turkish diplomats this week and had a chance to listen to the Turkish administration’s foreign policy vision spanning from Eurasia to the Middle East and North Africa during various think tank discussions.

One of the visiting diplomats, Ambassador Selim Yenel, deputy undersecretary for Bilateral Affairs and Public Diplomacy, was in Washington primarily for the sixth meeting of the U.S.-Turkey Economic Partnership Commission to follow up previous meetings to find ways to increase the trade between two countries. However, Yenel spent considerable time to reach members of the Congress, especially from the House Foreign Relations Committee, met some of the new members of the commission, and also talked at the German Marshall Fund, in a panel organized by Ian Lesser, senior Transatlantic fellow there. Interest in this particular discussion was high, as many of Washington’s serious Turkey watchers as well as diplomats from various European countries crowded the conference room.