A mild flutter ensued after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent meeting with his Turkiye counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York on September 21 when it came to be known that Cyprus figured in their discussion. Jaishankar highlighted it in a tweet.  

The line for promoting NATO's potential in the Asia-Pacific region (APR) using any tools is clearly taking shape, Nikolai Nozdrev, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Third Asian Department (3AD), said in an interview with Sputnik.

Bangladesh's national power grid collapsed Tuesday afternoon, plunging 140 million people, or nearly everyone in the country, into darkness, AFP reported. 

Reuters spoke with officials at the state-run Bangladesh Power Development Board, who said power transmission failed in the eastern part of the country and then tripped power plants nationwide, cutting off power to the capital, Dhaka, and other major metro areas. 

Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Monday wrapped up an official visit to Azerbaijan, where he met with the country’s President Ilham Aliyev and his Azeri counterpart, Zakir Hasanov.

Gantz’s visit focused on security and policy issues, with the aim of fostering defense cooperation between Jerusalem and Baku, according to his office.

During the visit, Gantz also met with the Chief of the State Border Service Colonel General Elchin Guliyev and visited a State Border Service headquarters.

The defense ministries of both Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other of violating a recent cease-fire on Friday.

Fighting between the neighboring countries, located between Turkey and Russia in the Caucasus, in early September left almost 200 soldiers dead.

Yerevan and Baku both said that the other had fired on their own military positions along the shared border.

Nepal has been battling a dengue outbreak, with the country recording over 17,500 infections and 21 related deaths in the past few months.  

The surge in dengue case numbers comes just as the COVID health crisis in the Himalayan nation was subsiding, with daily new coronavirus infections dropping to below 500. 

Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, has said that conditions for Myanmar’s 54 million people have gone from “bad to worse to horrific” since the military seized power last year.

Speaking to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Andrews said the international response to the crisis caused by the February 2021 coup had “failed” and that the Myanmar military was also committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual violence, torture, deliberate campaign against of civilians, and murder.

 A Russian-led security bloc will hold military drills in Kazakhstan from Sept. 26 to Oct. 8, the Kazakh defence ministry said on Thursday, telling the public not to be surprised by the arrival of foreign troops and military vehicles.

Kazakhstan is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) which also includes Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as Russia.

There are four possible scenarios for how everything could unfold:

1) Armenia remains in the CSTO and doesn’t receive US military equipment;

2) Armenian remains in the bloc but ends up receiving such aid;

3) Armenia announces its withdrawal from the bloc;

4) Armenia unilaterally hosts US forces and is kicked out of the CSTO.