Category News

A senior US official confirmed that US President Donald Trump will meet with Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s leaders for peace talks at the White House.

The official told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday that a possible framework for a peace agreement might be revealed at the meeting on Friday in Washington, DC.

No announcement of a resolution to the decades-old conflict was made after the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met last month in Abu Dhabi for peace talks.

Since Nagorno-Karabakh split away from Armenia in the late 1980s, the two South Caucasus nations have been at odds with one another.

Azerbaijan and Armenia claimed the area in 1917 after the Russian Empire fell, and there was a predominately ethnic Armenian population there.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh, sending almost all of Armenia’s 100 000 Armenians to Armenia.

In a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Armenia claimed that Azerbaijan had “wiped out all traces” of the ethnic Armenian presence in the disputed territory.

The case is related to the Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020, which resulted in the deaths of more than 6,600 people. It is one of three full-fledged wars the two nations have waged in the region.

The top court of the UN has mandated that Azerbaijan grant ethnic Armenians who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh a visa to return. Despite their national or ethnic origin, Azerbaijan claims to have not forced ethnic Armenians, who are primarily Christian, to leave the Karabakh region. It also claims that it is committed to ensuring all residents’ safety and security.

Azerbaijan, whose majority of its inhabitants are Muslims, also attributes its historical significance to the region, accusing Armenians of evicting Azeris from their homes in the 1990s.

After the two nations finalized a draft peace deal in March, the two nations convened in Abu Dhabi last month to discuss the situation.

No more specific steps were provided in the talks’ final statement, but the two leaders “agreed to continue bilateral negotiations and confidence-building measures between the two countries.”

Authorities in the United States have indict two Chinese nationals for violating export controls by sending tens of millions of dollars worth of advanced Nvidia chips to China.

The US Department of Justice claimed on Tuesday that Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang “knowingly and willfully” exported the graphic processing units (GPUs) used to power artificial intelligence without permission from October 2022 to July 2025.

According to export records, Geng and Yang, 28, organized at least 21 shipments with businesses in Singapore and Malaysia through ALX Solutions Inc., their El Monte, California-based business.

The US Department of Justice reported that the exports included a shipment of “false labelled” and illegitimately authorised Nvidia H100 GPUs that had been “falsely labelled” and had not received the necessary license from the US Department of Commerce in December 2024.

Instead of the businesses that accepted the shipments, ALX Solutions received payments from Hong Kong and China, including a $1 million payment from a Chinese company in January 2024.

Last week, a search of Geng and Yang’s and ALX Solutions’ offices revealed “incriminating communications,” including those regarding shipping chips to China through Malaysia to evade US export restrictions.

If found guilty under the Export Control Reform Act, Geng and Yang could receive a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The accused’s attorneys could not be reached for comment right away.

Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, claimed the case demonstrated that “smuggling is a nonstarter.”

A company spokesman said that “we primarily sell our products to well-known partners, including OEMs [original equipment manufacturers], who help us ensure that all sales adhere to US export control regulations.”

Any detained products would not have any service, support, or updates, despite being relatively small exporters and shipments being subject to thorough review and scrutiny.

In the midst of Washington and Beijing’s contentious battle for technological supremacy, the US government has halted the export of the most cutting-edge chips to China.

According to US officials, restrictions are necessary to safeguard national security, many of which were implemented under former US President Joe Biden.

China has accused Washington of undermining global trade and abusing its position of dominance in technology, which has responded with its own export controls against China.

Following discussions with US President Donald Trump, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced last month that Washington had agreed to rescind its ban on the sale of its H20 GPU to China.

On Wednesday, August 6, 2018, this is how things are going.

Fighting

• According to regional governor Oleh Syniehubov, the forces of Russian aggression attacked six Kharkiv-area settlements, killing three people and injuring ten in Lyman and Vovchansk.
• A duty mechanic was killed when Russian forces shelled a Lozova railway station. Ten people were injured, according to Syniehubov, including four other railroad workers.
• Four people were killed and three others were hurt in the 431 airstrikes that Russia carried out on 16 settlements in the Zaporizhia region of Ukraine, according to Governor Ivan Fedorov.
• According to Leonid Pasechnik, the region’s newly installed governor, four Ukrainian drones were killed in the district of Svatovsky in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region. A fifth worker injured in the strike had later passed away in a hospital, according to the head of the region’s health service, according to a statement from Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.

• A 30-year-old man was killed and a 51-year-old woman was hurt on Monday in the Svatovsky district of the Svatovsky district when a Ukrainian drone attacked a car.
• In a failed attack on Ukraine’s Sumy region, according to Ukrainian military intelligence, 334 Russian soldiers were killed and more than 550 were hurt in Ukraine. The report couldn’t be verified by Al Jazeera.
• Andriy Yermak, the country’s top official in Ukraine, claimed on Telegram that Kyiv had discovered Indian components in Russian drones used to attack Ukraine. Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify the information.

military assistance

• The Norwegian government announced in a statement that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark will contribute about 5 billion Norwegian crowns ($486.16) to the purchase of US weapons for Ukraine.
• Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, acknowledged the funding and claimed that the country had received “a further $500 million from our friends in Northern Europe: Sweden, Norway, and Denmark” for US weapons.
• According to the Pentagon, the US Department of State approved the potential sale of M777 Howitzer artillery guns, transportation, and consolidation services to Ukraine from BAE Systems and other US contractors for an estimated $ 203.5 million.

Regional security

• In response to a Polish request, the German air force will station five Eurofighter combat aircraft in Poland for a number of weeks, according to a spokesman for the air force. According to the Kyiv Independent news outlet, the move was used to deter joint Russian-Belarusian military exercises.
• After two military drones entered Lithuania’s territory from Belarus last month, the country’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote to the NATO military alliance in a letter.

Sanctions and the ceasefire

• Zelenskyy claimed to have a “productive conversation” with US President Donald Trump, “with the main goal of course being to end the war.”
• Trump claimed on CNBC that Russian President Vladimir Putin might be forced to put an end to Russia’s conflict in Ukraine due to falling energy prices.
• Trump said that if the energy levels drop, Putin will stop killing people. He’s going to have no other choice because his economy is in trouble if you get your energy down, or even $10 per barrel.

In a recent congressional vote, Petro claimed that Peru had “unilaterally” asserted control over the small island of Santa Rosa in a social media post on Tuesday.

On the social media platform X, Petro wrote, “The Peruvian government has just taken it by law.”

He added that Peru’s actions could prevent Leticia, a city in Colombia, from gaining access to the Amazon River. To defend our nation’s sovereignty, our government will use diplomatic means.

Petro’s remarks appeared to be in response to a vote in June that gave the island of Santa Rosa&nbsp, a district in its Loreto province, its name.

Peru and Colombia have debated who controls the island for almost a century.

Treaties from 1922 and 1929, which Peru signed, have affirmed ownership of Santa Rosa for decades.

However, Colombia maintains that the Santa Rosa island was not a part of the Amazon River at the time the treaties were signed and is therefore unaffected by them.

Additionally, it has been claimed that the treaties established a border between Colombia and the two nations at the deepest point along the Amazon River and that islands like Santa Rosa have grown up along the same dividing line.

The Peruvian government has simply taken the land that has appeared north of the current deepest line and placed Colombia’s capital on the land that, according to Petro, should have owned by the treaty.

He warned that the claims made by Peru to Santa Rosa could stifle trade and travel to nearby Leticia, which has a population of nearly 60 000.

Leticia could disappear as an Amazonian port, according to Petro’s statement on Tuesday, “which could lead to this unilateral action.”

On Thursday, Petro announced that he would hold celebrations in Leticia to mark Colombia’s declaration of its independence from Spain.

In a social media post, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it would push for more diplomatic means of determining the islands’ nationality.

Colombia has argued for years that bilateral work is necessary to be done in order to allocate islands, according to the ministry. The statement continued that Colombia “has reiterated the fact that Santa Rosa Island has not been given to Peru.”

The Amazon River has the most water discharged of any river, making it one of the longest in the world.

However, the river basin’s powerful currents deposit and rearrange sediment, creating islands and occasionally erasing them.

One of those younger islands is Santa Rosa. The village of Santa Rosa de Yavari, as well as the forest and farmland that surround the property, are now there.

According to Peru’s most recent census, the town has fewer than 1, 000 residents, and is largely dependent on tourism because of its close proximity to the Amazon.

Santa Rosa was designated as a district by the Peruvian government to ensure that it received federal funding and authority to collect taxes.