#armenia-azerbaijan-peace-deal

#armenia-azerbaijan-peace-deal

The handshake between Nikol Pashinyan and Recep Tayyip Erdogan represents a historic moment, as it is the first time an Armenian leader has visited Turkey.

Nareg Kopooshian will be the head coach for the U16 Armenian national team in the FIBA U16 EuroBasket competition from July 4-12 in Yerevan.

The ceasefire agreement, brokered by the United States and France, formally aimed to end active hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. In practice, however, the agreement never truly halted the conflict. Israeli forces maintained a presence in Lebanese territory, and military strikes against Lebanon continued on an almost daily basis.

Iranian health officials contend the U.S. and Israeli campaign has killed 1,200 people there. Lebanese authorities report 500 deaths in an Israeli assault. And we go next to Lebanon, where NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi has been covering this from Beirut.

We are on the trigger finger. After 22 years in the movement, we have never been this busy. The American-Israeli effort to bring down the Iranian regime is not likely to succeed without the help of PJAK and other Kurdish armed groups.

Numbering between 30 and 40 million worldwide, most live amid the peaks and valleys straddling the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds link their history to that of the Medes, an ancient Middle Eastern people. They were left stateless a century ago when the borders of the modern Middle East emerged from the collapsing Ottoman empire.

While the world's attention is on the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, the Israeli military has placed the West Bank under a functional lockdown. Checkpoints in and out of most major cities are closed, and Palestinians have been left to look for other travel arrangements. Some residents who spoke with Truthout said they traveled for hours through village back roads in an attempt to reach their destinations.

"pseudo-historical."

Within hours of the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran, US assets in Iraq's Kurdistan region came under retaliatory attacks from Tehran-backed groups, dragging the country into the conflict that has since expanded across the Middle East and beyond. Since then, US assets located in Iraq have come under multiple attacks from pro-Iran groups and Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC).

The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US. The post was made during Vance's two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago.

Vance was greeted with a red carpet, an honor guard and an official delegation before he was driven to a meeting with Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Speaking to reporters before the meeting, Vance said, "The prime minister has been a great friend of ours and a real ally in peace and development in this region (of) the world."

The Syrian army and the SDF agreed to a four-day ceasefire on Tuesday, after Kurdish fighters relinquished swaths of territory to government forces, which also sent reinforcements to a Kurdish stronghold in the northeast. Government troops have seized expanses of northern and eastern territory in the last two weeks from the SDF in a rapid turn of events that has consolidated President Ahmed al-Sharaa's rule.

Trump has given both sides until June to reach deal, but future of Donbas industrial heartland remains a sticking point. Russian and Ukrainian envoys are set to engage in a new round of United States-brokered talks next week in Geneva as the war approaches the four-year mark with no apparent compromises on territory in sight. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that the trilateral talks, which follow two earlier rounds in Abu Dhabi, would be held on February 17-18, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

President Trump's tactic of "flooding of the zone" has focused much of the public sphere on issues and events generated by the president's interests and whims, driving the suffering of millions of people into oblivion. Deserved attention is paid to Trump's threats to annex Greenland, his intervention into Venezuela, the imposition of arbitrary and punitive tariffs on European allies, and the assault of ICE on Minneapolis.