Government

With nine months to go before Baku hosts the Eurovision pop-music competition, transparency concerns are arising about Azerbaijani government expenditures on the event.

It seems Turkey’s generals, so long a force in the country’s politics, are going out with a whimper, not a bang.

A powerful earthquake registering 6.2 on the Richter scale struck Ferghana Valley early July 20, affecting Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The epicenter of the quake was about 45 kilometers south of the Uzbek city of Ferghana.

The killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghan President Ahmed Karzai, was a shocking development -- even for Afghanistan, a country steeped in tragedy. But experts are unsure whether it will have a lasting impact on political developments.

“To lay an egg, or not to lay an egg: that is the question,” is a running joke among Azerbaijani Facebook users these days.