Eurasia

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is meeting his counterpart Kristian Vigenin on July 7, during his official visit to Bulgaria. He is to mark the 135th anniversary since diplomatic relations were established between Bulgaria and Russia, the Foreign Ministry in Sofia said in a statement to the media.

Amid growing calls for a fresh ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the country’s president told U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden on Thursday that both Russia and the separatists were rejecting his efforts in this regard. In a phone conversation with Biden, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he had suggested a number …

Syrian activists say rebels have attacked the village of the country’s defense minister and captured parts of it. Activists say the attack began Friday with a suicide bombing that targeted a checkpoint in the village of Rahjan in the central province of Hama.

Turkey condemned the five year entrance ban to Crimea which was made to the head of the National Assembly of the Crimean Tatar People. Refat Chubarov was slapped with a five-year entrance ban by the peninsula’s pro-Russian administration.

Amid requests from both Afghan presidential candidates to broaden the investigation of suspected ballot fraud, the US reaffirmed its support for a “sovereign, unified, and democratic Afghanistan.” State Department

Pakistanآ’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif visited troops on the front line in North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan and vowed that terrorists will be chased and hunted down across the country till their final elimination, said military.

Iraq’s new parliament postponed its next session for five weeks on Monday, extending the country’s political paralysis in the face of a Sunni Islamist insurgency which claimed the life of an army general on the northwestern outskirts of Baghdad. Citing the inability of political camps to reach “understanding and agreement” …

Tunisia said Monday it will host a meeting of foreign ministers from the six countries neighbouring Libya, to discuss ways of helping it deal with political turmoil and rising lawlessness. A meeting of Maghreb countries on the situation in Libya had been scheduled for early June but it was delayed indefinitely because of the lack …

ISIS-led insurgents are creating an Islamic state out of the vast strips of land they control in Iraq and Syria, the militants have announced. Its territory will extend from Syria’s Aleppo, once the economic heart of the country, to the Diyala province in the east of Iraq. The Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which from now is to call itself simply “Islamic …

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be his party’s presidential candidate at the vote this August, ruling AKP officials say. The widely expected announcement comes briefly after President Abdullah Gul declared he was not intending to stand for a second term in office, amid speculations he might try to do so and could put Erdogan’s ambitions …