Azerbaijan

A draft text released Friday from the environmental negotiators at the U.N.’s COP29 climate alarmism summit would demand that wealthy nations commit to gifting poorer countries $250 billion a year between now and 2035.

Argentina withdrew its negotiators from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday, the third day of the conference.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, whose country is hosting the COP29 climate summit this week, lashed out at Western media and climate activists on Tuesday for criticizing his country’s oil and gas industries.

The COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, opened on Monday with a declaration that climate alarmism is still in vogue, even with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House and a stern lecture for wealthy countries to stop thinking of climate funding for developing nations as “charity.”

Climate groups are crying foul that Azerbaijan, host of the COP29 global climate summit in November, is planning to dramatically increase its production of natural gas over the next decade.

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Azerbaijan on Sunday for a two-day state visit, looking to bolster Russia’s relationship with the aggressive Islamist power even as relations with Armenia — Russia’s former best friend in the region — deteriorate.

Communist Cuba, a regime that has for decades used sports competitions to elevate its geopolitical profile, has faced a series of embarrassments in the first days of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics – including a high-profile defection before the Games even began and a loss in boxing to a Cuban exile.

A Democrat congressman accused of bribery spent roughly half of the money for his 2024 campaign on legal services, according to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Iranians have been asked to pray for the safety of President Ebrahim Raisi after his helicopter went missing on the way back from a meeting Sunday with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan.

Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted Friday on bribery charges after allegedly accepting $598,000 in bribes from foreign entities.

Ilham Aliyev, the strongman president of Azerbaijan, used his platform at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Germany on Friday to declare the presence of fossil fuels in his country a “gift of the gods” and declare his intention to expand Baku’s exports to Europe.

Armenian organizations were outraged by President Joe Biden’s Armenian Remembrance Day statement on Wednesday because he did not mention modern genocide against Armenian Christians of the Nagorno-Karabakh region completed this year by the conquering armies of Muslim Azerbaijan.

Officials in Istanbul banned a ceremony attempting to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide organized for Wednesday, an event perpetrated by the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire and continuously denied by Ankara to this day.

The Kremlin on Wednesday confirmed media reports from Azerbaijan that Russia will withdraw all of its utterly useless “peacekeepers” from the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The Russians did nothing while Azerbaijan used force to seize control of the area last year and ruthlessly conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Armenian Christians who lived there.

Freedom House rates the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan conquered in 2023, as the most unfree place on Earth.

As the U.S. and Israel seek to contain Iranian proxies along multiple fronts, major Jewish leaders are highlighting a little-known yet critically strategic relationship between the Jewish state and Azerbaijan.

United Nations relief personnel arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh on Sunday to discover that nearly all of the ethnic Armenian Christians who have lived in the region for centuries have fled, leaving only “ghost towns” for invading Muslim-majority Azerbaijan.

The separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh announced its own dissolution on Thursday, ceding total control of the region to Azerbaijan after surrendering to a swift and overwhelming Azeri assault two weeks ago.

Armenian separatists on Wednesday agreed to a cease-fire with Azerbaijan that effectively surrendered control of their territory to the Azeri government. The separatists agreed to disband and disarm their forces, and Azerbaijan agreed to halt military action against them.

The congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss the plight of Armenian Christians trapped by an Azerbaijani blockade in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. The commission heard testimony from experts who said Azerbaijan’s actions clearly constituted genocide, with complicity from Turkey and the Islamist forces it has dispatched into the region.

Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned to the campaign trail this weekend in anticipation of the country’s May 14 elections. He made two public appearances before granting an interview on Sunday night in which he claimed his administration eliminated the head of the Islamic State.

Armenia on Sunday observed the 108th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide with a procession of 10,000 torchbearers marching through the capital city of Yerevan.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s remarks to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday focused on what he described as “the latest Azerbaijani unprovoked aggression.” Armenia and Azerbaijan are once again skirmishing along their contested border, each side accusing the other of violating a cease-fire negotiated after they fought a six-week war in 2020.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s address to the 77th U.N. General Assembly in New York City on Tuesday was largely dedicated to his contention that nearly all problems can be solved through “dialogue,” and Turkey is indispensable to every dialogue in the Middle East and Asia.

Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to soften his public image on Saturday by taking a walk through Central Park in New York City, which he is visiting to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

The federal government allowed an Azerbaijan national to secure naturalized American citizenship as he was molesting his children, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reveals.

Drones are the hot new item in the Middle East’s perpetual warfare, deployed by national armies, militias, and terrorist groups with increasing confidence and proficiency. 

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Tehran “will not tolerate geopolitical change in the Caucasus” while visiting Moscow on Wednesday, adding that Iran has “serious concerns about the presence of terrorists and Zionists in this region,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Azerbaijan began joint military exercises with Turkey on Tuesday, a week after Iran held its own border exercises and accused the Azeris of joining Israel’s “Zionist regime.” Azerbaijan also pushed back by shuttering a mosque linked to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran held military drills near its border with Azerbaijan on Tuesday, dismissing complaints from its neighbor by invoking Iranian “sovereignty” and declaring it “will not tolerate the presence of the Zionist regime near our borders.” Azerbaijan is a majority-Muslim nation that has warm relations with Israel, which evidently makes it part of the “Zionist regime” in the eyes of Iran.

(AP) — Stadium security in Baku appeared to confiscate a rainbow flag from two Danish fans ahead of the European Championship quarterfinal match between the Czech Republic and Denmark.

BERLIN (AP) – A lawmaker with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has died after collapsing on a plane during a flight home to Germany.

The local government in south-central Konya, Turkey, announced this week that it would turn a fully renovated 19th-century Armenian church into a “humor art house” after barring worshippers from using the church for years, multiple reports revealed Thursday.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday that Azeri forces appear to have deliberately bombed a Christian church in the Nagorno-Karabakh town of Shushi during recent fighting over the breakaway territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

An Iranian lawmaker threatened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Twitter over the weekend after Erdoğan recited a poem last week allegedly promoting separatist sentiment among Iran’s Azeri minority.

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Armenian officials and Azerbaijan on Saturday accused each other of breaching a peace deal that ended six weeks of fierce fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan’s leader threatened to crush Armenian forces with an “iron fist.”