Author: Greg Madatian

The Armenian Community of China, commonly known as ChinaHay, organized numerous gatherings across China on April 24 including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong to commemorate the 101st anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the reports.

“Hundreds of Armenian survivors from across the Ottoman Empire escaped eastward across the Caucasus and Russia, seeking refuge in China. They not only rebuilt their lives, but reconstituted community life and built a church (Harbin) and community centers in different cities. They established a relief association, youth groups, Armenian language and history classes, and a choir,” said Dr. Khatchig Mouradian, a genocide scholar whose research has also focused on the Armenian communities in China in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“It is particularly moving that 101 years after the genocide, Armenians in some of these very same cities held commemoration events on April 24,” he added.

Small yet vibrant Armenian communities existed primarily in Harbin, Shanghai, Manzhouli, Tientsin, and Hong Kong from the late 19th till the mid-20th century. Most Armenians left for the Americas or for Soviet Armenia by the 1950s. Today’s Armenian community in China is only a few decades old, and is primarily comprised of professionals and business people from the Middle East and North America, as well as university students from Armenia and other CIS countries, noted Mouradian.

Dozens of former Turkish public officials, including former police chiefs, went on trial on April 19 on charges of negligence over the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 that sent shockwaves around the country, the reports.

The suspects face accusations of failing to uncover the plot to murder Dink, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly Agos and a passionate advocate of reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

A total of 34 suspects — including eight who are under arrest — went on trial in the first hearing at the Istanbul criminal court, Anadolu Agency reported.

Among those on trial are the former national police intelligence chief Ramazan Akyürek, former Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah and former Istanbul police intelligence chief İlhan Güler.

Dink, 52, was shot dead with two bullets to the head in broad daylight outside the offices of Agos in central Istanbul on January 19, 2007.

Ogün Samast, then a 17-year-old jobless high-school dropout, confessed to the murder and was sentenced to almost 23 years in jail in 2011.

But the case grew into a wider scandal after it emerged that the security forces had been aware of a plot to kill Dink but failed to act.

Also among those on trial on April 19 was Ercan Demir, who was police intelligence chief of the Black SeaTrabzon region where the gunman came from.

Anatolia said that another prominent suspect, former top Istanbul police official Ali Fuat Yılmazer, was already under arrest as part of investigations into the outlawed group of the US-based preacher Fethullah Gülen, the arch enemy of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

There have been numerous indications that the authorities want to emphasise the alleged links between the suspects and Gülen, whose followers are the subject of a major nationwide crackdown.

Turkey’s top court in July 2014 ruled that the investigation into the killing had been flawed, paving the way for the trial of the police officials.

Georgian Foreign Minister Mikheil Janelidze visited the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial today. The Foreign Minister laid a wreath at the memorial to the Armenian Genocide victims and paid tribute to their memory with a minute of silence.

Deputy Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute Suren Manukyan briefed Minister Janelidze on the tragic episodes of the Armenian Genocide, the history of construction and the architecture of the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial.

Suren Manukyan accompanied the Georgian Foreign Minister to the Memory Wall to introduce him to the humanitarian pages of the Armenian Genocide history.

Jars with soil taken from the graves of public and political figures, witnesses of the Armenian Genocide and friends of the Armenian people, are buried behind the Memory Wall.

The AGMI Deputy Director gifted some English and French publications to Mikheil Janelidze.

MEPs and parliamentarians from Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine meet this week to discuss energy cooperation and common security threats, according to the European Parliament’s official website.

A session of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together MEPs and Armenian, Georgian, Moldovan and Ukrainian parliamentarians, takes place in Brussels this week.

A major computer security vulnerability has been discovered – with experts cautiously warning it could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of devices, apps and services, the BBC reports.

However, due to the nature of the bug, it is extremely difficult to know how serious the problem is.

“Many people are running around right now trying to work out if this is truly catastrophic or whether we have dodged a bullet,” said Prof Alan Woodward, a security expect from the University of Surrey.

Google engineers, working with security engineers at Red Hat, have released a patch to fix the problem.

It is now up to manufacturers, and the community behind the Linux operating system, to issue the patch to affected software and devices as soon as possible.

In a blog post explaining the discovery, Google’s team detailed how a flaw in some commonly-used code could be exploited in a way that allows remote access to a devices – be it a computer, internet router, or other connected piece of equipment.

The code can also be within many of the so-called “building blocks” of the web – programming languages such as PHP and Python are affected, as well as systems used when logging in to sites or accessing email.

“It’s not a sky-is-falling scenario,” said Washington D.C-based security researcher Kenneth White.

“But it’s true there’s a very real prospect that a sizable portion of internet-facing services are at risk for hackers to crash, or worse, run remote code to attack others.”

He said that while there is no publicly known attack code using the flaw, it’s a “near certainty” hackers would try to exploit the weakness.

Energy Minister, Kakha Kaladze, started visit to Iran on Monday to discuss potential gas imports and cooperation in other areas of energy sector, the Georgian Energy Ministry said, Civil Georgia reports.

“The Georgian and Iranian sides are at this stage studying possibilities of import of Iranian gas to Georgia. Possibilities for implementation of various other investment projects in the energy sector will also be discussed,” the Georgian Energy Ministry said in a brief statement on Monday.

At a public discussion on Georgia’s energy policy, hosted on February 10 by Tbilisi office of Heinrich Böll Foundation, Georgian Deputy Energy Minister Mariam Valishvili said that buying Iranian gas at this stage is not commercially viable for Georgia as it is about 25% more expensive. She said that some type of energy swap arrangements are not ruled out, but it is a long-term perspective and she does not foresee anything tangible for a short-term period.

“But we want to be in the forefront of negotiations with Iran, because the latter is interested with our region and we are interested in this resource [Iran] – so there is a concurrence of interests, but now it’s difficult for me to say what kind of shape this relations may take,” Valishvili said.

Georgian Foreign Minister, Mikheil Janelidze, met his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on the sideline of the security conference in Munich on February 12.

Georgia’s PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili spoke by phone with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani on February 8.

Starting from February 15 Georgia reinstated 45-day visa-free rules for Iranian citizens, which were scrapped by Tbilisi in 2013.

Visitors to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles can see for themselves what a legal battle that raged for five years was all about. Two brilliantly illuminated pages—part of a table of contents from the Zeyt’un Gospels, a Medieval Armenian bible—are on show as part of the exhibition Traversing the Globe Through Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (until 26 June), reports.

The Getty bought eight of these contents pages, known as a canon table, for $950,000 from an Armenian-American family in 1994. But their proper ownership has been in question since 2010, when a US branch of the Armenian Apostolic Church brought a lawsuit against the Getty, maintaining that the pages had been looted during the Armenian genocide of the First World War.

The lawsuit was finally settled last year, when the Getty acknowledged the church as the rightful owner and agreed to pay undisclosed lawyers’ fees. The church agreed to donate the pages to the museum.

The pages are by the 13th-century Armenian master Toros Roslin, who worked in tempera and gold paint on parchment. A page on show at the Getty for the first time in more than a decade reveals how he blends natural forms such as twisting pomegranate trees and roosters with architecture, using a brilliant palette of green, gold, red and blue.

Photo: Reuters

 

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence in northern Kenya of what could be the earliest example of warfare between different human communities, the reports.

The 10,000-year-old remains of 27 people found at a remote site west of Lake Turkana show that they met violent deaths.

They were left to die there rather than being buried.

Many experts had thought conflict emerged only around 6,000 years ago after humans became more settled.

The archaeologists, who have been working on the site at Nataruk since 2012, discovered that the victims were clubbed or stabbed to death in a single event.

The dead included male and female adults, as well as children.

The evidence, published in the journal Nature, does not reveal exactly what happened but it was definitely the result of “some sort of conflict”, according to Cambridge University Professor Robert Foley.

Photo: Reuters/Express News

 

At least seven people have been killed in a bomb blast close to a police checkpoint in north-western Pakistan, police and local officials say, the BBC reports.

About 20 people were also wounded in the blast, which took place in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) on the outskirts of Peshawar.

There has been fierce fighting in the region between security forces and the Pakistani Taliban.

No-one has yet said they carried out the attack.

TV footage of the latest attack showed vehicles parked near the blast site on fire after the explosion.

The bomb went off near Peshawar’s Karkhano Market, The Express Tribune reported.

It quoted eyewitnesses as saying the bomb was planted on a motorbike – but there are conflicting reports as to whether it was a suicide blast or a remotely controlled explosion.

Photo: Reuters

Oil prices hit their lowest since 2003 on Monday, as the market braced for a jump in Iranian exports after the lifting of sanctions against the country over the weekend, Business Today reports.

The UN nuclear watchdog on Saturday said Tehran had met its commitments to curtail its nuclear programme, and the United States immediately revoked sanctions that had slashed Iran’s oil exports by around 2 million barrels per day (bpd) since its pre-sanctions 2011 peak to little more than 1 million bpd.

On Sunday, Iran – a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – said it was ready to increase its exports by 500,000 bpd.

“Iranian exports come at a very bad time,” said Barclays analysts. A chronic global surplus of a million barrels or more of crude daily has pulled down oil prices by over 75 per cent since mid-2014 and by over a quarter since the start of 2016.

Worries about Iran’s return to an already glutted oil market drove down Brent to $27.67 a barrel early on Monday, its lowest since 2003. The benchmark was at $28.55 by 0523 GMT, still down over 1 per cent from its settlement on Friday.

US crude was down 38 cents at $29.04 a barrel, not far from a 2003-low of $28.36 hit earlier in the session.