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Turkey announced on Saturday it had cancelled a visit from Sweden, after an anti-Turkish protest was allowed in Stockholm.
Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said the talks with his Swedish counterpart P？l Jonson were called off as they had "lost significance and meaning".
The visit was intended to try and remove Ankara's objections to Sweden's NATO bid.
Swedish-Danish right-wing extremist, Rasmus Paludan, was permitted to hold a demonstration on Saturday in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, arousing the ire of Turkey.
Paludan had said he intended to "burn the Quran" in front of the building.
Sweden's foreign minister Tobias Billstr？m condemned hatred towards Muslims Saturday afternoon, but emphasised there were certain freedoms in his country.
"Islamophobic provocations are appalling," he tweeted. "Sweden has a far-reaching freedom of expression, but it does not imply that the Swedish Government, or myself, support the opinions expressed."
A counter, pro-Turkish protest was also planned at the embassy.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin condemned the demo, calling it a "hate crime".
"To allow this action despite all our warnings is to encourage hate crimes and Islamophobia," he tweeted. "The attack on sacred values ？？is not freedom but modern barbarism."
Turkey has blocked Sweden's NATO bid since May in an attempt to get Stockholm to fulfil several political demands, such as deporting critics of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kurds it claims are "terrorists".
Why does Turkey want to block Finland and Sweden from NATO?
Critics have warned against meeting these demands, saying they undermine rights and freedoms in Sweden, alongside the country's sovereignty.
Sweden's Minister of Defence confirmed the trip had been “postponed”, a decision he said was made with his Turkish counterpart on Friday during a meeting on Ukraine in Germany.
"Relations with Turkey are very important to Sweden and we look forward to continuing the dialogue," P？l Jonson tweeted.
Ankara summoned the Swedish ambassador over the protests for the second time in days.
Last week Turkey's heckles were raised by the release of a video showing a mannequin resembling Erdogan being hung and labelling the Turkish president a dictator.
It was posted by a group affiliated with the Rojava Committee, which supports Kurds in Syria.
A pro-Kurdish demonstration, in which this committee participates, is also planned in Stockholm on Saturday, against Swedish membership of NATO and Turkish President Erdogan.
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Turkey accuses Sweden of harbouring Kurdish activists and sympathisers whom it calls "terrorists", particularly those of the Kurdistan Workers' Party ( PKK) and its allies in northern Syria and Iraq.
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A river in the Balkans, known for its stunning natural beauty, has been transformed into a giant floating rubbish heap, amid a spell of bad weather, worsened by long-running mismanagement.
Tonnes of plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tires, household appliances, driftwood and other waste have piled up behind a barrier in the Drina River in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which snakes through forested hills.
Much of this rubbish was dumped in poorly regulated riverside landfills or directly into the waterways that flow across three countries in the Balkans, accumulating behind the fencing as it flows downstream.
The barrier installed by a Bosnian hydroelectric plant, a few kilometres upstream from its dam near Visegrad, a city in eastern Bosnia that has unwillingly been turned into a waste site, local environmental activists complain.
A photo of the rubbish.Armin Durgut/Copyright 2023 The AP. All rights reserved.
Heavy rain and unseasonably warm weather over the past week have caused many waterways in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro to overflow, flooding near-by areas and forcing scores of people from their homes.
Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad said “the huge inflow of garbage” was not stopping, despite torrential rainfall and floods subsiding.
The Drina River runs 346 kilometres from the mountainous northwestern Montenegro through Serbia and Bosnia. Many of its tributaries are known for their emerald colour and breath-taking scenery.
Some 10,000 cubic meters of waste are estimated to have amassed behind the Drina River's rubbish barrier in recent days, Furtula said.
The same amount was pulled in recent years from the river.
'Huge environmental and health hazard'
Cleaning up the waste is not the end of the issue.
Removing the rubbish takes on average up to six months. But it ends up at a local landfill in Visegrad, which Furtula said lacks even the capacity to handle the city’s own waste.
“The fires on the landfill site are always burning,” he said, calling the conditions there “not just a huge environmental and health hazard, but also a big embarrassment for all of us.”
Decades after the devastating 1990s wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.
A photo taken from a helicopter of the rubbish.Armin Durgut/Copyright 2023 The AP. All rights reserved.
The countries have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound waste disposal systems, despite seeking EU membership and adopting some of the bloc's laws and regulations.
Unauthorised waste dumps dot hills and valleys throughout the region, while rubbish litters roads and plastic bags adorn trees.
Beside river pollution, many countries in the western Balkans have other environmental woes.
One of the most pressing is the extremely high level of air pollution affecting a number of cities in the region.
“People need to wake up to problems like this," Visegrad resident Rados Brekalovic said.
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It was their first march through the US capital since the Supreme Court gave them what they had been demanding for half a century, but for anti-abortion activists gathered in Washington on Friday, the mood was more dogged than triumphant.
Seven months after the nation's highest judicial body removed federal protections for nationwide abortion access, protesters outside the conservative-led institution allowed themselves a modest victory lap, but most were focused on the fights ahead.
"We have a lot of work to do," said George Muench, a 74-year-old Catholic in a "March for Life" hat.
The march began in 1974 as a challenge to Roe v. Wade, a landmark Supreme Court ruling the previous year that guaranteed the right of American women to terminate their pregnancies.
Roe v Wade
Every January, activists from across the United States have descended upon the capital to walk to the courthouse's iconic front steps to urge the justices inside to reverse that decision.
On June 24 last year they got their wish. The high court, which had lurched to the right under hardline Republican former president Donald Trump, relented, giving states the freedom to pursue their own abortion bans.
More than a dozen states immediately rushed to do exactly that.
As determined as Friday's "March for Life" crowd was, their position is in the minority in modern America.
Referendums on reproductive rights held since June have all been won by abortion rights advocates, including in conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky.
From Sunday, the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the other side gets its turn with pro-abortion rights demonstrators planning to rally in cities across the country.