Category: News

Azerbaijan will additionally supply 500 million cubic meters (mcm) of gas a year to Georgia, according to Rovnag Abdullayev, president of Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR.

Abdullayev made the remarks speaking to Trend at the second meeting of the Southern Gas Corridor Advisory Council in Baku Feb. 29.

“Previously, we supplied 800 mcm of gas a year to Georgia from the Shah Deniz,” he said. “We have managed to increase the supply through that route to 1.5 billion cubic meters (bcm), as well as to 1.5 bcm via a pipeline connecting the two countries in Azerbaijan’s Gazakh district.”

He also said that at present, there is an opportunity to additionally obtain 500 to 700 mcm of gas from the Shah Deniz consortium.

Azerbaijan exports gas to Georgia via a pipeline linking the two countries in the Azerbaijani district of Gazakh.

This pipeline can pump more than 2.5 bcm of gas a year.

A woman dressed all in black and holding what is thought to be a child’s severed head has been arrested near a metro station in Moscow. She was shouting, “I am a terrorist,” and reportedly threatened to blow herself up, reports.

According to LifeNews, the victim was a girl, identified as Nastya M. After the murder, the female suspect went to a metro station, where she was stopped by a local police officer. She immediately took the severed child’s head from her bag and started shouting that she had killed the child. The suspect is currently being detained by police authorities, Russian media reported.

“The end of the world is coming in a second…I’m your death,” the woman is heard shouting in the video released online. “I hate democracy. I’m a terrorist.”

She is heard shouting that she has been “cursed” and “destroyed” “so many times.”

“I’m your suicide bomber… I’m going to die in a second…The end of the world…,” she shouted.

The woman appeared near Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station in northwest Moscow.

Russia’s Investigative Committee later released a statement that rescuers have found a body of a three or four-year-old child after extinguishing a fire in a Moscow apartment block. A preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect is a children’s nanny in her late 30s, who is a citizen of a “Central Asian country.”

The suspect waited until the child’s parents left the apartment with an older child, then killed the child and set the apartment on fire, the Investigative Committee said.

The mother of the murdered child was taken to hospital in unconscious after she learned the news, Russia’s Zvezda TV channel reported.

Earlier on Monday, reports emerged that police had found a child’s headless body while extinguishing a fire at a Moscow apartment block. The child was about three or four years old, Interfax reported, citing sources.

The woman, identified by LifeNews as Gulchekhra Bobokulova from Uzbekistan, committed the murder because of her husband’s betrayal. According to LifeNews sources, she failed to explain how the child was connected to her husband. The woman was reportedly drugged, a source in police authorities told Interfax.

People in shops near the Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station have been evacuated, TASS reported, adding that police have sealed some exits from the station.

On 26 February Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan visited Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin and met his Holiness Garegin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians.

The President acknowledged the role of the Armenian Apostolic Church from the viewpoint of strengthening the independent Armenian statehood, cementing the Armenia-Artsakh-Diaspora trinity, as well as maintaining the Armenian national identity.

Primate of the Artsakh Diocese Archbishop Pargev Martirosyan, and a number of supreme hierarchs of the Armenian Apostolic Church partook in the meeting.

Asbarez – Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) entered the following statement into the Congressional Record:

“Mr. Speaker, I rise to commemorate the 28th anniversary of the pogrom against the Armenian residents of the town of Sumgait, Azerbaijan. On this day in 1988, and for three days following, Azerbaijani mobs assaulted and killed Armenians. When the violence finally subsided, hundreds of Armenian civilians had been brutally murdered and injured, women and young girls were raped, and victims were tortured and burned alive. Those that survived the carnage fled their homes and businesses, leaving behind everything they had in their desperation.

“The pogroms were not an accident. They were the culmination of years of vicious anti-Armenian propaganda, spread by the Azerbaijani authorities. The Azerbaijani authorities made little effort to punish those responsible, instead attempting to cover up the atrocities in Sumgait to this day, as well as denying the role of senior government officials in instigating the violence. Unsurprisingly, it was not the end of the violence, and was followed by additional attacks, including the 1990 pogrom in Baku.

“The Sumgait massacre and the subsequent attacks on ethnic Armenians, resulted in the virtual disappearance of a once thriving population of 450,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan, and culminating in the war launched against the people of Nagorno Karabakh. That war resulted in thousands dead on both sides and created over one million refugees in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Time has not healed the wounds of those murdered in the pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku. To the contrary, hatred of Armenians is celebrated in in Azerbaijan, a situation most vividly exemplified by the case of Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army captain who savagely murdered an Armenian army lieutenant, Gurgen Margaryan with an axe while he slept. The two were participating in a NATO Partnership for Peace exercise at the time in Hungary. In 2012, Safarov was sent home to Azerbaijan, purportedly to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Instead, he was pardoned, promoted, and paraded through the streets of Baku as a returning hero.

“The assault on ethnic Armenian civilians in Sumgait helped touch off what would become a direct conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karbakh. And today, Azerbaijan’s dangerous behavior on the Line of Contact threatens peace and stability in the region. Artillery and sniper fire across the Line of Contact has become a fact of daily life for civilians in the Nagorno Karbakh Republic, causing numerous casualties. I have urged the OSCE Minsk Group to deescalate the situation by ending a policy that equates unprovoked attacks by the Azerbaijan with the defensive responses of Karbakh and Armenian troops, and by pressuring Azerbaijan to accept the installation of technological monitoring devices along the border. The anniversary of Sumgait is a reminder of the consequences when aggression and hatred is allowed to grow unchecked.

“Mr. Speaker, this April we will mark the 101st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, an event the Turkish government, Azerbaijan’s closest ally, goes to great lengths to deny. We must not let such crimes against humanity go unrecognized, whether they occurred yesterday or 28 years ago or 100 years ago. Today, let us pause to remember the victims of the atrocities of the Sumgait pogroms. Mr. Speaker, it is our moral obligation to condemn crimes of hatred and to remember the victims, in hope that history will not be repeated.”

On 26 February, 2016, the United Nations in Armenia and the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Armenia signed the Customs Facilitation Agreement, a bilateral agreement allowing the expedition of the import, export and transit of relief consignments and possessions of relief personnel in the event of disasters and emergencies. This marks a major step forward in strengthening preparedness and a pioneering initiative for others in the region.

Armenia’s vulnerability to natural disasters led the Government to prioritize the rapid deployment of international aid in emergency situations by lowering customs barriers. The negotiations between the UN and the Government of Armenia started in 2013. To date, similar agreements have been signed with the governments of Belarus, Bhutan, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Liberia, Mali, Moldova, Nepal and Uzbekistan.

Developed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 1994 and approved by the World Customs Organization in 1996, the Model Customs Agreement between the UN and member states includes recommended measures to expedite customs clearance procedures, including simplified documentation and inspection procedures, the temporary or permanent waiving of duties and taxes on imports, as well as clearance arrangements outside official working hours and locations.

The agreement signed today will allow aid consignments, including search and rescue teams, search dog teams and mobile medical units, high technology emergency communication equipment and other emergency relief items a speedy import / export and transit into the country in the event of a disaster requiring external assistance.

Such agreements along with vital information shared by natural authorities enable UN agencies, intergovernmental, governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as other humanitarian actors to quickly contact appropriate National Customs Authorities to bring in relief consignments for saving lives and reducing the suffering of the affected people.

Iranians are voting in elections for their country’s parliament and the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that appoints the supreme leader, the BBC reports.

The poll is the first since Iran and world powers agreed a landmark deal over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Reformists and moderates who back President Hassan Rouhani have formed a coalition called The List of Hope that aims to reduce the number of hardliners in the two bodies.

Almost 55m people are eligible to vote.

The parliamentary elections are to elect 290 MPs for four-year terms. Voters will also select 88 clerics to the Assembly of Experts, who serve eight-year terms.

Voting started at 08:00 local time (04:30 GMT) and closes at 18:00. But officials say polling stations could stay open longer if there are queues and more time is needed.

The Europa League last 16 draw has been made in Nyon. The two legged-ties will take place on March 10 and March 17. Borussia Dortmund have been drawn against Liverpool in the Europa League’s last 16.

Europa League draw in full

Shakhtar Donetsk v Anderlecht
Basel v Sevilla
Villarreal v Bayer Leverkusen
Athletic Bilbao v Valencia
Liverpool v Manchester United
Sparta Prague v Lazio
Borussia Dortmund v Tottenham
Fenerbahce v Braga

– It has been revealed that the Trabzon gendarmerie intelligence office had been watching Hrant Dink around his home for 4 months before he was assassinated.

Yasin Hayal’s relative Coskun Igci informed Trabzon gendarmerie intelligence office about the Dink murder in the summer of 2006. Hayal is the Turkish criminal who is serving a life sentence for inciting the individual who murdered Dink.

According to Selahattin Gunday’s report in Al Jazeera, it was also confirmed that 4 officials from the gendarmerie intelligence office came to Istanbul on August 2006.

Cellphone records of the officials from the intelligence office were examined and it showed that their phones were signaling from IIstasyon Cad. Odak İş Hanı No:l Bakırköy between August 8 and 11.

After that, Dink’s cellphone records were also examined and this examination revealed that his phone was also signaling from the same address at the same time. This address is close to Dink family’s permanent address.

In 2008, a lawsuit was filed against 3 of those officials due to neglect of duty. However, the fact that they had been following Dink in Istanbul wasn’t added to that lawsuit.

This information about the gendarmerie isn’t in the indictment prepared by prosecutor Gokalp Kokcu. This information also wasn’t included in the lawsuit that was filed against police chiefs like Faruk Sarı, Ahmet İlhan Guler, Engin Dinc, Ali Fuat Yılmazer, Sabri Uzun and Ramazan Akyurek.

On October 15, 2015, the information about the gendarmerie was separated from the lawsuit against police chiefs. This doesn’t mean that they are excluded from the investigation, but that the gendarmerie wasn’t in the indictment.

Republican MP Lernik Aleksanyan is confident the cooperation between the Republican Party of Armenia and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation will be an additional resource.

Speaking to reporters today, the MP said “the essence of this cooperation is much deeper and is conditioned by both domestic and foreign challenges.” He assured assured the authorities are going to implement radical changes deriving from the new Constitution, and this requires additional resources.

Aleksanyan said the two political forces have identical views on the system of state governance.

Tevan Poghosyan of the Heritage faction said any cooperation between political forces is welcome. He does not believe, however, that the agreement pursues the aim of building a strong country. He considers that there would be more trust had completely new, young people been brought into politics. According to him, it’s a simple political process leading up to the parliamentary elections of 2017.