Month: May 2008

HOLOCAUSTS REMEMBERED

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
May 3, 2008 Saturday

More than 100 people gathered April 24 at the Florida Holocaust
Museum in St. Petersburg for a service in memory of the 1-million
to 1.5-million men, women and children who perished between 1915 and
1923 in what is referred to as the Armenian Genocide.

The service, led by the Rev. Hovnan Demerjian of St. Hagop
Armenian Church in Pinellas Park, above, also remembered the more
than 11-million people who died during the Holocaust of World War
II and "all who have perished because of their creed, the family
they were born into and their background." The evening’s program,
which included a curator talk by Mary Johnson and a presentation by
Eileen Barsamian Jennings, a child of Armenian Genocide survivors,
marked the opening event of a new museum exhibit, "The Greatest Crime
of the War: the Armenian Genocide during World War I." Armenians,
a Christian minority in a Muslim community, lived in what is now
eastern Turkey and in the southeastern part of the country that is
today occupied principally by Kurds. Historians say that in 1915,
the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party of the Ottoman Empire
deported thousands of Armenians, sending them to starvation and death
in the Syrian desert. Many were attacked and killed, and young women
were raped and forced into harems or to marry their abductors. The
Florida Holocaust Museum exhibit, at 55 Fifth St. S, opened April 19
and will run through Oct. 19. The exhibition begins with a history
of the Armenian people and follows the political and international
events leading up to the genocide and the genocide itself.

NEWS OF RELIGION: ARMENIAN ASSEMBLY

Providence Journal-Bulletin (Rhode Island)
May 3, 2008 Saturday

The 106th Diocesan Assembly of the Armenian Church of America
(Eastern) is being hosted by Saints Sahag and Mesrob Armenian Church
in Providence this weekend, the first time in more than 30 years.

The gala banquet will be held tonight at 7 at the Providence Marriott
hotel ballroom. Oscar Tatosian, chairman of the Diocesan Council,
will make presentations. Honored as Friend of the Armenians will be
Sen. Jack Reed. Honored as Armenians of the Year are brothers, Kevork
Atinizian of Belmont, Mass., and Nishan Atinizian of Winchester, Mass.

Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., a celebration of the Divine Liturgy will be
officiated by His Eminence Archbishop Khajag Barsamian, primate of
the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern). This service
will be conducted at the Marriott and will be followed with a farewell
brunch served at the church s Egavian Cultural Center. For information,
call (401) 272-7712 or visit

HOW TO GET BEYOND RACIAL TENSIONS THAT PERSIST IN AMERICA
by Carol Petersen Columnist

Intelligencer Journal/New Era
May 3, 2008 Saturday
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Are there issues, situations or events so dark, so horrible, so evil
that they are impossible to recover from?

There are victims of childhood abuse who are forever scarred,
who struggle every day for the rest of their lives with issues
of self-worth. There are Vietnam vets living on the streets who
have spent 40 years looking backward at the war, robbed of their
lives. Crime victims often battle Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for
years, reliving their attack over and over, emotionally crippled.

Good counseling aims at helping a victim deal with past events,
with the goal of processing what happened, coming to some measure of
understanding, then helping the counseled move on.

Ideally, the trauma can be put in some manageable perspective, dealt
with in a healthy way, insights can be gained, and the counselor can
help this person open his heart and mind to new possibilities. Learning
to leave the past firmly in the past, help can be provided to give
this victim the freedom to view the future with hope again.

Are there national, international or global events so shocking or so
inhuman that reconciliation is forever impossible?

Human history is punctuated with heinous, cruel, shocking, nauseating,
inexplicable atrocities. Just the past two centuries have been marked
by wars of epic proportions, the Armenian genocide, ethnic cleansing
in the Balkans, atrocious genocidal events in Rwanda and now Darfur,
constant strife in the Middle East, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany,
and rising numbers of deadly terrorist attacks.

Slavery is the United States’ national disgrace. Legions of
politicians, activists, sociologists, organizations and the courts
of justice at every level have tried to untie the Gordian knot of
race relations.

There has been progress. Constitutional amendments and Supreme Court
decisions, along with the Civil Rights Movement, have brought us a long
way. Yet, the candidacy of Barack Obama and the recent well-publicized
rants of Jeremiah Wright have brought to the surface a lot of unsettled
racial issues, a lot of very old baggage and ugly emotions and hateful
expressions among whites and blacks.

If a victim of childhood abuse begins every counseling session starting
at the beginning time after time, verbally reliving each abusive
event over and over, and for 20 years talks only about the abuse,
there will never be healing. The counseling will serve to bind this
person to their past, to keep them locked in the prison of victimhood.

I wonder if the same is not also true of slavery and race relations.

Jeremiah Wright and Black Liberation Theology cannot set
African-Americans free by keeping their churches, their people,
focused backward, beginning every discussion with rehearsing the
evils of slavery. Constantly, weekly, venting anger and hate and wrath
which whips a congregation into angry resentment is not an effective
way to change the world, nor give people a future and a hope. It just
keeps them victims.

A true reverend, a man serving Jesus and his flock, would be telling
them that God loves them, and that God, through Christ, has forgiven
them. He would be teaching them that the people who receive the love
and forgiveness of God are called to love – to love God, to love one
another, and to even love their enemies. He would be challenging
those who have been forgiven to forgive – to forgive one another,
and to forgive even their enemies.

And he would remind them that Jesus, innocent of any crime, as He
was being executed, set the ultimate example by praying, Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do.

A true reverend would remind his people that we are called by God to
be different from the world, to overcome evil with good.

Perhaps the way to racial harmony is to acknowledge the immense sin
of slavery, experience forgiveness from one another, put slavery
to rest in the past, turn our backs to a settled past, and face the
future together as one people.

Then we can begin every discussion with problem-solving creativity,
moving toward what all our people of every race need to ensure a
strong, united, more perfect union.

Petersen is a freelance writer, artist and photographer from Lancaster
Township.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

LIES PROLIFERATE IN THE WORLD’S KILLING FIELDS

Canberra Times (Australia)
May 3, 2008 Saturday
Final Edition

This remarkable but harrowing encyclopedia of genocide could induce
repetition strain, outraged denials, possibly even a sorrowful yearning
to join a kinder species. After Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined
the term "genocide" postwar, the UN defined this as "acts committed
with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial,
ethnical, or religious group".

Ben Kiernan, a Yale-based Australian historian, takes his main title
from an ideological tract of 1930s Germany. The first two parts review
"imperial and colonial" slaughters up to the early 20th century while
the third considers a "multiplicity" of subsequent genocides. Kiernan’s
summation of the Third Reich restates his four perceived correlates
of state-linked killing: "The Nazi killing machine" was "operated
by interlocking ideological levers that celebrated race, territory,
cultivation, and history". To make his case, the author is forever
splicing unexpected and illuminating primary-source threads that come
from years of practice. I was comfortable with his limited material
on the recent past and substantial reluctance to forecast the near
future. Yet I kept thinking of the elephant (I mean, the anthropoid)
in the room our evolution and biology. The durable pre-Christian
state of Sparta is typecast as "secretive, militaristic, expansionist"
and as a source of myth for the short-lived Reich.

Another potent idea surfacing early is that, by accident or design,
artists and intellectuals supply lethal ammunition for politicians and
generals. So you read Cato the Censor’s famous interdiction against
Carthage, but also Hesiod’s and Virgil’s poetry of the plough. Early
Christian and Jewish writers, argues Kiernan, shunned racialist
thinking, the term "race" only becoming prominent in medieval
times. In the first of his case studies, he finds the Spaniards
plumbing "intellectual depths" for God’s consent to the Central
American conquest.

But he also reveals the to-and-fro of contemporary debate. Various
citations from the early 1500s regret the Mexican and Guatemalan
bloodbaths. "War" commingles with "genocide" in the East
Asian examples. National role-reversals and repetitions become
familiar. Under a metaphorical alliance of "writing and chariots",
the Buddhist kingdom of Dai Viet crushes its formerly competitive
rival Champa, only to pay a heavy price later. Inspired by "ancient
precedents", Japan of the 1500s assaults Korea, but "genocide abroad"
is a harbinger for "violent cultural suppression at home". Japan
reappears in the context of its 20th century Chinese and Pacific
incursions. The chronicle of England’s 16th century Irish depredations
resonates. A cabal of Elizabethan "neo-cons" appears to agitate,
not only for rivers of tears in Ireland, but also for the later
miseries of indigenous America and Australia. Although Elizabeth
herself is "parsimonious" in support, there follow martial law and
massacre. In the peculiar logic of extermination, the Irish locals
don’t quite cut it as proper yeomen, but kill one and you could go
for the lot. Blood and Soil implies an 80-90 per cent decline from
all causes in the indigenous North American (Australian) population
over 1492-1800 (1788-1901). It suited English settlers in eastern
America to discount the agricultural Native American settlements
they displaced. But the "genteel, controlled, expanding rural idyll"
of early 1700s Virginia could "explode in genocidal rage". George
Washington’s late- 1700s war secretary writes that colonial settlement
has been "even more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct
of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". The Jeffersonian democracy,
in Kiernan’s view, required Native Americans to yield up "their
lifestyle, their lands, or their lives without the vote". Once the
Cherokee nation is erased, the California indigenes are trampled in
the dashes for "scientific racism" and precious gold. Next come the
wars and woes of Australian settlement. Up to Federation, the author
estimates that "multiple deliberate killings" by squatters, mounted
police and others accounted for 20,000 Aborigines. He concedes that
frontier interactions were diverse and some settlers abhorred the
violence. But with racial "science" casting Aborigines as inferior
nomads, "classical pastoralism" and government directives could drive
an ideological program to convert indigenous lands. Denialism continues
in Australia as elsewhere.

This, I note, includes an animus towards "Genocide Studies" and the
broad UN definition of genocide. Call it or count it as you will,
the evidence repeated here is part of Australian history. It is that
colonial agencies condoned or sometimes conducted the "dispersals",
which were aired in their assemblies, investigations, reports
and journals. If some of those Spanish imperialists and American
republicans could ‘fess up then, maybe we can now. The cynical
collateral damage of the American and Australian land-rushes
is distinguishable from the following Armenian and Holocaust
slaughters. Typically, Kiernan first explains lebensraum, a
geographer’s neologism to accompany Germany’s South West African
occupation around the turn of the 20th century. From there, he picks
at the rancid racial fears and florid territorial fantasies of Hitler,
Himmler and supporting theoreticians. Sustained by myths of Sparta,
Rome and ancient Germany, Hitler could claim his ancestors were "all
peasants" and impose a Germans-only Hereditary Farm Law. It is often
remarked that citizens, not psychopaths, were the Nazi functionaries.

Kiernan doesn’t go there much, apart from his neat opening point
that genocidal enterprises require both "apocalyptic vision and
prudent compromise". What he does illustrate is the even bigger
territorial-ethnic engineering scheme the Reich had waiting in the
wings. Soviet Russia is portrayed both as Nazi victim and Stalinist
perpetrator of its own monumental program against the kulaks and
the elite. But China is said to have exacted a famine toll far in
excess of Stalin’s. I’ll leave the experts to determine whether state
famine equals genocide. Blood and Soil concludes by touring the post-
1950 killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Indonesia, Pakistan (in
Bangladesh), Guatemala (once again), Saddam’s Iraq, Bosnia, and Sudan
(Darfur). Khmer Rouge rhetoric is compared and contrasted with that
of Rwanda’s Hutu Power. At the outset, Kiernan guesses that the 21st
century might be "bleak". He also nods to the surprising evidence that
the genocide (or war or murder) toll is trending downwards relative
to population. At the end, he remains convinced of his four great
genocidal narratives. But surely his outstanding demonstration is that
all through history the narrators of these themes are telling fibs. To
what extent then are the themes correlates or causal factors in mass
killing? The book, as it happens, cites the biological metaphors of
genocide rather than the underlying biology. I believe that more of
an interweaving from evolution, culture and technology would sharpen
the expositions emerging from genocide studies. The human lineage,
after all, appears to have been evolving and deploying its uncommon
adaptation of territorial inter-group violence since Paleolithic
times. When Carthage finally fell in 146 BC, it was long after men
in militias had first sacked settlements, but long before six billion
humans had stormed the planet.

Stephen Saunders is a Canberra reviewer.

TOP AZERI OFFICIAL DISMISSES RICE’S DEMOCRACY REMARKS AS "UNSERIOUS"

Azad Azarbaycan TV
May 3 2008
Azerbaijan

A top Azerbaijani official has dismissed as "unserious" US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rices’ remarks about the state of democracy
in Azerbaijan.

Ramiz Mehdiyev, head of the presidential administration, also appeared
to be ridiculing Rice’s statement that Azerbaijan needs to do more
to improve its democracy than neighbouring Armenia does.

"According to Condoleezza Rice’s logic, the February-March events in
Armenia should be repeated in Azerbaijan before she can say anything
positive about Azerbaijan," Azad Azarbaycan TV showed Mehdiyev telling
reporters. "I view this as an unserious statement."

Mehdiyev was referring to Armenia’s post-election clashes that left
10 people dead.

He said that Azerbaijan would "follow its path" despite pressures
from international organisations.

Mehdiyev also promised that the forthcoming 15 October presidential
election would be held in a "normal, transparent, democratic
atmosphere".

$30,000 FIGHT FOR $1.20 JAILED MAN TAKES RACE CLAIM TO VCAT
By Fiona Hudson And Liam Houlihan

Sunday Herald Sun (Australia)
May 4, 2008 Sunday

A MAN jailed for kidnapping a single mother and setting her on fire
triggered a $30,000 tribunal hearing during the week — effectively
to argue about $1.20 in lost pay.

Loddon prison inmate Hasan Huseyin Alipek sought the VCAT hearing
over claims he was denied a jail factory leading hand job because of
his poor English skills.

Serial litigant Alipek said the alleged discrimination had financially
disadvantaged him and made him wonder if there was something wrong
with him.

He asked tribunal deputy president Cate McKenzie during the three-day
hearing to reduce his prison sentence as compensation.

A prison guard told the tribunal she had not even considered Alipek for
the job and his language skills had nothing to do with the decision.

The job was given to a prisoner who had been longer at the factory
than Alipek, the guard said.

The tribunal also heard Alipek assaulted another inmate soon after
missing out on the job and would have been ineligible for promotion.

Alipek effectively missed out on, at most, one day’s pay at the higher
rate awarded to leading hands — a gap of about $1.20.

Costs associated with the hearing are estimated to have topped $30,000,
including an interpreter at $20 an hour and a video link from prison
at $89 an hour.

Alipek, representing himself, used his time on the video link to make
a series of wild claims against prison bosses.

He claimed guards tried to feed him pork — which as a Muslim he could
not eat — and an officer had given an inmate a knife to stab him.

In a separate action this year Alipek, a political refugee from Turkey,
said his court interpreters were biased because they were Armenian.

Mother-of-three Hulya Cavus suffered burns to 40 per cent of her body
when Alipek doused her with petrol and set her on fire in October 2002.

He was sentenced to 14 years’ jail and is not due for release before
2013.

Deputy president McKenzie reserved her judgment.

HE BROUGHT HOPE TO PEOPLE WITH BEHAVIORAL PROBLEMS DR. RICHARD ASARIAN
by Joe Fahy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
May 4, 2008 Sunday
REGION EDITION

Inspired by the 1989 movie "Field of Dreams," Dr. Richard Asarian
planted corn and constructed a baseball diamond at his farm in
Washington County, holding occasional softball games there with
friends and family members.

The fanciful pursuit, they said, suggested his love for life and
baseball — and his belief that everyone, including the troubled people
that he served as a clinical psychologist, should strive toward dreams
of a better life.

Dr. Asarian, 61, of Scenery Hill, died Tuesday at his home. The cause
was a heart attack, said his son, Aram.

In his professional career, Dr. Asarian focused much of his attention
on bringing hope to people with behavioral problems, including criminal
offenders. But his interests were wide-ranging.

They included religious studies, existential phenomenology and the
Chautauqua Institution in New York, which he visited regularly. He
was an amateur guitar player, blues singer and songwriter and was
an avid fan of Democratic politics and sports teams, especially the
Pittsburgh Pirates.

"He loved nature, the environment and creativity in general," his
son said.

Of Armenian descent, with a hearty laugh, Dr. Asarian was known for
his humor and zest for life.

"He was eccentric in a fun kind of way," said his older brother,
Dr. John Asarian, a pediatrician. He noted that his brother had a
fuschia-colored hot tub installed in his dining room and, on a trip
to Paris, wore a cowboy hat as he sat outside near the Seine River
and played his guitar.

He also formed a group of friends, known as the Brotherhood of the
Symbolic Stalk, to shake corn stalks at Pirates games.

But friends and colleagues also recalled the optimism and compassion
he brought to the people he served.

He was a co-founder of the Ielase Institute, an agency that provided
community-based mental health treatment to criminal offenders, said
his longtime friend, Earl Hill, program director for a local drug
and alcohol treatment program.

In his latest job, director of psychology at Torrance State Hospital,
Dr. Asarian helped patients with mental illness, including those
struggling with addictions, to focus on their ability to move toward
recovery, said Edna McCutcheon, the hospital’s chief executive officer.

She recalled how he performed at a professional conference last year
with a patient who also played guitar.

"You could see the pure joy on Richard’s face," she said, adding
that he was concerned with "maximizing the skills our individuals
could attain."

Dr. Asarian "could always make you laugh and was a wonderful
optimist. He could see the best in everything," said another friend
and local epidemiologist, Dr. Melissa Wieland.

Dr. Asarian was born in New York City to Sherman and Zabelle
Asarian. His father was a dentist and his mother a homemaker.

After his father joined the Army, the family lived in California,
Virginia and Kentucky before settling in the Fresno, Calif. area in
the late 1950s.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Fresno State University and a
master’s degree from Sonoma State University before earning a Ph.D. in
psychology from Duquesne University in 1981.

For about 20 years, beginning in the mid-1970s, he worked at the
Ielase Institute, serving as clinical director. He also worked at other
agencies around the area, including several correctional facilities,
and served on a state addictions task force.

He had been at Torrance State Hospital since 2006.

Besides his son, of Washington, D.C., and brother, of Chico, Calif.,
Dr. Asarian is survived by his former wife, Anne Asarian Cummins of
Washington, Pa., and three nephews.

Interment will be private. Arrangements are being handled by Hummell
and Barnhill Funeral Home. Memorial contributions can be made to the
American Diabetes Association.

Friends are invited to a memorial service at 7 p.m. Friday at the
Century Inn on Route 40 in Scenery Hill.

TV REPORTS ON AIR DEFENCE EXERCISE AT RUSSIAN AIR BASE IN ARMENIA

Zvezda TV, Russia, Ministry of Defense
May 4 2008

[Presenter] The country’s southern shield is being tested for
robustness: alert signals were sounded again at the Russian air base
in Armenia. Fighter aircraft are scrambled into the air. A few minutes
into the flight it becomes clear that it was a practice alert.

The air defence forces on the ground also tested their readiness to
repel attacks. Our special correspondent Andrey Kovtunenko followed
the military exercise in Armenia’s peaceful skies.

[Correspondent] [Passage omitted] It is battle quarters at the Russian
air base of Erebuni. [Passage omitted] While the pilot is getting
ready for the flight, the technicians, having run 100 metres [to the
aircraft], are removing covers from a MiG-29. A few minutes later,
the pilot jumps into the cockpit and is ready to take off. [Passage
omitted]

The border with Turkey is only 14 km away – for a MiG, it is just
a couple of minutes. Therefore, depending on the combat mission,
[the pilot] has to turn one way or the other and fly back.

In 1998, the air group revamped its fleet: MiG-29s went on combat
training duty at the CIS combined air defence system. It is now 10
years since the MiG-29 started protecting the skies over Armenia. The
aircraft has acquitted itself well in hot conditions and in the
mountains. Experienced pilots treat this aircraft with respect:
it is easy to run and reliable in combat.

One can only speak to the pilot after he has accomplished his combat
mission: traditionally, they do not give interviews before the flight.

[Yevgeniy Yakimov, captioned as an aviation regiment commander; in the
cockpit after landing] We perform air defence tasks in the CIS combined
air defence system. We are performing our tasks successfully. On 22
[presumably April] there was a major large-scale exercise at the CIS
combined air defence system. We achieved our objective in full.

[Correspondent] Only a few years ago, Turkish pilots often staged
aerial tests for ours. Nowadays, this is a rare occurrence.

[Pavel Maratkanov, captioned as deputy commander of the air base for
educational work] It is not often that we are scrambled into action
but it happens. Sometimes they make sorties to test us – but not
often. The most recent incident was last year.

[Correspondent] While pilots polish their aerial skills, the missile
defence system is on permanent combat duty. Russian and Armenian
officers track all aerial targets together.

At the air defence base near Gyumri [also in Armenia], meanwhile,
the S-300 and Kub-3M missile defence systems are on alert. Servicemen
from this regiment recently took part in an exercise in Ashuluk
[in southern Russia]. Their performance was marked as excellent.

[Aleksandr Surinkin, captioned as anti-aircraft regiment commander]
At the 2008 tactical exercise with live firing, the regiment fired
on evading low-flying aerial target. The target was destroyed at the
maximum range. The mark was excellent.

[Correspondent] It is no secret to anyone here that Armenia regards the
102nd Russian military base deployed in the republic as an element of
it national security. In this country, they value friendly relations.

TEXT OF ARMINE NALBANDIAN’S SPEECH

Boston Globe
May 2 2008
United States

Arminé Nalbandian delivered these remarks today at Northeastern
University’s commencement at the TD Banknorth Garden:

American author Dale Carnegie once uttered the famous words "When
fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade." I’ve always been a strong
proponent of making the best of the worst situations, but when life
handed me the biggest lemon of all just three months ago, I was pretty
sure Dale Carnegie was full of it.

I received a call late one night and when the voice on the other end
told me that my mom, a psychotherapist, had been killed on the job
by one of her patients, the world around me literally fell apart. In
the chaos of those first couple of weeks, I remember thinking back
to Dale Carnegie’s words and wondering just how I was supposed to
make lemonade out of this one.

And then something happened; I realized that there was nothing to do
but to go on. There was nothing to do but to face this challenge just
as I had faced every other challenge before. So I picked up the pieces,
relied on the support around me and made my way back to the real
world. By now perhaps you’re wondering how all of this relates to the
reason we are all sitting here today. Why bring up such a depressing
story at a time when we should be celebrating our achievement?

I’ll give you one reason; because if it weren’t for the lessons I
had learned during the past five years at Northeastern University,
there is a good chance that I wouldn’t have known the first thing
about how to take a lemon and make it into lemonade.

I’ve often wondered about the value of a true education. I have
pondered the meaning of Sir Francis Bacon’s claim that "knowledge is
power." And I’ve come to realize that the value of education is not
in the rite of passage itself, but more about the possibility for
the future.

Here at Northeastern, I have learned not just how to calculate
a margin of error or analyze Plato’s Republic, but through this
process I have learned how to think and the choice of what to think
about. Professors, administrators, mentors and staff at this university
have taught me over and over how to see the obvious, yet extract the
unseen, I have been taught how to see an issue from someone else’s
perspective, whether the issue is a disagreement among politicians
on a government policy or a disagreement between roommates over who
did the dishes last.

An old Latin proverb dictates, "We learn not at school, but in
life." As graduates of Northeastern, we have been lucky enough to learn
from both. Not only have we gained maturity through experiencing the
daily grind of a nine to five workday, but we have also learned how to
listen, how to lead and how to address an issue with thoughtfulness
and insight. Through our experiential education, we have gained not
only intellect and maturity, but we have learned how to use it. We
have taken theory and made it practical. We have learned the freedom
that comes from education. We have learned how to extract power from
our knowledge.

Our time at Northeastern has been full of great memories and moments,
the friendships we have built are for a lifetime and the pathways
we have embarked upon and the challenges we have faced are just the
beginning of this new and exhilarating phase. I have learned that
we are the generation that can mend the errors of the past. Now more
than ever is a time for progress.

Our generation is not a lost one as some claim. We are more involved
in politics than many who came before us; we care to be the change
we want to see around us. Every generation has its own challenge,
but with every new challenge we are given a new set of tools. We
have reached today with a fresh set of tools, ones named Google,
Youtube and Facebook, ones that have changed the world community and
the prospects of our future and ones that will allow us to forge new
paths in politics, medicine, art, engineering, business, science,
and in life.

We have molded and shifted this campus with our presence and
achievements; we have seen Northeastern through the ‘top one hundred’
revolution, to the opening of the first Starbucks on campus. We have
done great things for this school and now we must challenge each
other to do great things for this world.

Ladies and Gentleman of tomorrow, don’t ever forget this moment; don’t
ever ignore your thirst for knowledge, your hunger for truth. Never
ignore your ability to see both sides of the story, and to forgive,
even when it seems impossible. Never forget what your professors
and mentors at this great institution have taught you. Never look at
your experience as average — don’t think of Northeastern and only
remember the times when things just didn’t go your way — think of
what you have learned, and what you been taught.

Remember the staff member that helped you through the NU shuffle,
or the classmate who helped you get through the death of someone who
meant the world to you. Recognize the obstacles, but don’t forget
about the solutions- remember how to take those lemons and make
them into lemonade. Love what you do, never settle, be passionate
and compassionate, love yourself and those around you, talk less and
listen more, open your mind, have your own opinion and most of all,
inspire others as you have been inspired…pay it forward.

We are the future forgers of peace, curers of cancer, abolishers of
genocide, architects of industry, inventors of truth. As the great
Roman poet Virgil once said, "They can because they think they
can." Each of you sitting here today has a discoverable gift, and
let us challenge each other to settle for nothing less than achieving
the promise others see in us and we see in ourselves.

Ladies and gentleman of the Northeastern University class of 2008,
your path is yours, your story is your own, make lemonade.

–Boundary_(ID_3ezcWKP01uo9C2ZStLHZlA)- –

EDWARD NALBANDIAN SAYS HIS UPCOMING MEETING WITH ELMAR MAMMADYAROV WILL HAVE A CHARACTER OF ACQUAINTANCE

Azeri Press Agency
May 2 2008
Azerbaijan

Yeravan-APA. Armenian foreign minister Edward Nalbandian said he was
hopeful that his meeting with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar
Mammadyarov on May 6 in Strasbourg would be rich in content, APA
quotes Armenian sites.

In his address to the Armenian parliament Nalbadian said it would
be their first meeting and most likely would have a character of
acquaintance. "It will be an acquaintance but I hope that the meeting
will end with the agreement to continue talks". The minister also said
that concerns over the boost of Azerbaijan’s defense expenses couldn’t
be estimated as interference in internal affairs of that country.