Author: Maghakian Mike

NEW ENGLAND’S YOUNG PROFESSIONALS MEET IN MASSACHUSETTS
ArmRadio.am
08.06.2006 12:05
AAA Board of Trustees Member Lu Ann Ohanian and her husband, Bruce
Ohanian, hosted an event for Armenian-American young professionals
at their home in Belmont, Massachusetts. Young professionals from
Massachusetts and Rhode Island gathered together to meet one another
and share their ideas for future events of the Armenian Assembly
of America.
The group welcomed Harout Semerdjian, Director of Public Relations
and Communications for KNOW GENOCIDE, a multi-ethnic coalition united
against genocide denial, founded by the Assembly. Semerdjian discussed
the pending federal lawsuit filed by the Assembly of Turkish American
Associations and others against the Massachusetts Board of Education to
insert materials in the State Curriculum Guide that deny the Armenian
Genocide. Attendees also discussed potential ideas for fundraising
events in the New England area. Bruce Ohanian encouraged the group
to be goal and mission oriented when planning such events.
“We are pleased to once again host such a committed group of young
professionals,” said Lu Ann Ohanian. “We encourage their continued
participation in the Assembly and look forward to future gatherings
to discuss Armenian-American concerns.”
“We thank the Ohanian’s and the young professionals for their
activism,” said Executive Director Bryan Ardouny. “Their dedication
ensures a promising future for the Assembly and Armenia.”

MONITORING OF CONTACT LINE BETWEEN KARABAKH AND AZERI ARMED FORCES WITHOUT INCIDENTS
PanARMENIAN.Net
06.06.2006 15:01 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ June 6 in compliance with an earlier agreement with
authorities of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, an OSCE mission held a
planned monitoring at the contact line between Karabakh and Azeri Armed
Forces to the east of Seysulan settlement of the Mardakert region of
the NKR. Field Assistants of the Personal Representative of the OSCE
Chairman-in-Office Peter Key (UK) and Jrzhi Aberle (the Czech Republic)
held the monitoring from the positions of the NKR Defense Army.
The monitoring was held in compliance with the schedule, no breaks
of the cease-fire regime were registered. However, the Azeri party
again failed to take the OSCE observers to its frontline.
Representatives of the MOD and MFA of NKR accompanies the mission
from the Karabakh side, reports the NKR MFA Press Service.

ARMEN HOVNANIAN: SODA JERK ROSE TO DRUGSTORE EXEC
By Stan Donaldson
Free Press Staff Writer
Detroit Free Press, MI
June 5 2006
Armen Hovnanian
It didn’t take long for Armen Hovnanian to know what he wanted to do
with his life.
At 13, while working as a soda jerk at a Detroit pharmacy in the 1940s,
he told his parents and siblings his dream of becoming a pharmacist.
Later, as a student at Central High School in Detroit, he worked
in a pharmacy after school to learn the ropes of the business. He
used that knowledge to become a leader in one of Michigan’s largest
drugstore chains during the 1970s.
“I always thought he was a brilliant man,” said his sister, Mary
Keoleian of Farmington Hills.
Mr. Hovnanian of Farmington Hills died Friday at Beaumont Hospital
in Royal Oak of emphysema. He was 76.
Born in Akron, Ohio, Mr. Hovnanian’s family moved to Detroit while
he was an infant.
After graduating high school in 1947, he attended the Detroit Institute
of Technology and graduated in 1951 with a pharmacy degree.
A short time later, he was drafted into the Army and served during
World War II for two years as a lab technician.
Mr. Hovnanian met his wife, Suzanne, while working for the Cunningham
Drugstore chain. They were married 33 years.
He was promoted to executive vice president of the company in 1971 and
was responsible for sales. He helped the store develop the concept
of a one-stop drugstore, which sold pharmacy items along with other
merchandise. He worked for the company for nearly 30 years.
He loved classical music and was a Detroit Tigers baseball fan.
In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. Hovnanian is survived by a son,
Michael; and two sisters.
A funeral service is set for 11 a.m. today at St. John’s Armenian
Church, 22001 Northwestern Highway, Southfield.

No cadre massacres expected at the National Assembly

ArmRadio.am
03.06.2006 15:40
After Arthur Baghdasaryan’s resignation most of the employees of the
Staff to the former NA Chairman, including Head of Staff and three
Advisers, filed their resignations, Head of Staff of the National
Assembly Hovhannes Zargaryan told `Radiolur.’ He added that all in all
490 people work at the National Assembly, including the technical
staff. The number of civil servants, whose activity is regulated by RA
Law on Civil Service, is 190.
Yesterday the newly elected NA Chairman Tigran Torosyan said that no
cadre massacres are expected at the National Assembly.

The New York Times
June 4, 2006 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
Spoonfuls of Culture Help Medicine Go Down
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
When officials at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center were preparing
a new clinic in Sunset Park in April, everything was ready for the
big opening day except the big opening day itself.
”One of our staff members told us it was an unlucky date,” said
Pamela S. Brier, the hospital’s chief executive. ”We had to change
it.”
So the ribbon-cutting, originally scheduled for April 24, was moved
to the following day. It was a difference of only 24 hours, but all
the difference in the world to the Chinese immigrants the clinic was
largely built to serve, who believed the 25th to be a more auspicious
date.
It was one of the many ways in which the $1 million clinic was
carefully designed to cater to Sunset Park’s fast-growing Chinese
population, one of the largest in the city.
Because the color white is associated with death in China, the walls
are mostly painted in yellow and pink tones. And because Chinese
immigrants have high rates of tuberculosis infection, every patient
is tested for it. The chefs in the main hospital’s kosher kitchen
have learned to prepare rice porridge, a beloved Chinese comfort
food. ”Language, culture, food — it’s all tremendously important,”
Ms. Brier said.
The new clinic is Maimonides’s most ambitious effort to respond to a
growing and increasingly diverse population of immigrant patients. It
also reflects a broader national shift in health care as urban
hospitals move beyond the translation services that started becoming
common in the late 1990’s and acknowledge that language is not the
only barrier they face in treating people from all over the globe.
Some come from cultures that are broadly skeptical of Western
medicine, and prefer the herbs and poultices of traditional healers,
”cures” that in some cases can retard the effects of prescribed
medicines or produce dangerous interactions. Others come from
cultures where they are expected to hide sickness from strangers, or
where it might be offensive for male doctors to examine female
patients.
”It’s been a slow trend to develop because it’s not always clear to
a hospital how big a certain community might be, and sometimes it
takes a couple of years to manifest,” said Rick Wade, a senior vice
president of the American Hospital Association. But now, he said,
programs are appearing everywhere, to strengthen what hospitals call
”cultural competency.”
At Oakwood Hospital in heavily Arab Dearborn, Mich., nurses are
trained to point the beds of Muslim patients toward Mecca. In
Glendale, Calif., which had a rapid influx of Armenian immigrants
during the 1990’s, one hospital sponsors a popular health-related
call-in show that is broadcast in Armenian on cable-access
television.
But challenges can be more varied and daunting for hospitals in
places like Brooklyn, home to insular communities of Orthodox Jews,
Muslims from conservative Arab countries, recent immigrants from
rural China and Hispanics from Central and South America, among many
others.
”In each culture that we’re dealing with, there are different ideas,
family values and beliefs, whether about medicine or life in
general,” said Virginia Tong, a vice president at Lutheran Medical
Center, one of south Brooklyn’s largest health care providers.
”Let’s say you had an Hispanic godparent who brought a patient in to
see a doctor. In this country, we would say, ‘That’s not a parent;’
there might be legal issues. But in their culture, godparents are
almost as important as parents.”
Lutheran’s main hospital has a mosque on site; it also runs clinics
aimed at Caribbean and Korean immigrants. In 2001, Lutheran opened
its own Chinese clinic, on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, after a
survey showed that most Chinese immigrants in the area were going to
Chinatown in Manhattan for medical care.
Maimonides, long known as ”the Jewish hospital,” in Ms. Brier’s
words, has in recent years customized the care at many of its 15
clinics, which are around southwest Brooklyn, based on the cultures
and needs of the patients each serves.
The doctors at the hospital’s Newkirk Avenue clinic, for example, see
many Indian immigrants, who have disproportionately high rates of
hypertension. Its pediatricians also see many children born in
Bangladesh. Because infants there are often not immunized against
measles, as most babies are in the United States, that means more
effort devoted to vaccination and extra care in reporting cases to
public health officials to contain any outbreaks.
But the hospital’s outreach to Chinese immigrants is its biggest,
driven by what its officials believe will be continued population
growth in south Brooklyn. ”We go where the patients are,” Ms. Brier
said.
Maimonides opened its first Sunset Park clinic in a brownstone
building in 1996. Within three years, doctors there were seeing 9,000
patients a year, including a growing number of Chinese. The number of
patients has doubled since, prompting the latest move from a
storefront space to a 10,000-square-foot building on Seventh Avenue
and 64th Street.
The attending doctors there speak Mandarin or Cantonese, two major
Chinese dialects. About 70 percent of the patients are Chinese,
according to Dr. Bing Lu, the clinic’s medical director, and a
significant number are recent arrivals to the United States. Many
hold the traditional belief, he said, that drawing blood for tests
drains a person’s life force, and they are reluctant to allow it.
”We teach them that they need it,” he added, relying on the staff
members’ language skills and familiarity with Chinese culture to
reduce patients’ suspicion. ”Generally speaking, Chinese people
don’t believe in preventative care.”
Such an attitude can be deadly. A few years ago, doctors at the
clinic found early signs of liver cancer in a man in his 30’s who was
infected with hepatitis B. The man left the clinic, Dr. Lu said, and
did not return the clinic’s phone calls. When he finally came back
six months later, he was jaundiced and underweight, with a severely
enlarged liver. The cancer had advanced beyond the possibility of
life-prolonging surgery.
It was ”a fatal mistake,” said Dr. Lu, who believes the man at
first sought out traditional healers instead of returning to the
clinic.
Several patients praised the doctors’ warmth and staff members’
willingness to help them with paperwork. Susan Lin, 31, who emigrated
from China’s Fujian Province five years ago, said, through an
interpreter: ”Sometimes we’re afraid to ask questions, to ask how to
follow up. Here, they always smile, they are always welcoming. You
feel very comfortable asking questions.”
Recently, an 80-year-old woman arrived at the clinic just before
closing time, asking to see a doctor. She said it was urgent, but
when examined she would say only that she had been unable to sleep
for about a week.
Under careful questioning, Dr. Lu said, she eventually revealed that
her husband had died the previous week, and that she had been crying
and having anxiety attacks, details that a Chinese woman her age
might consider inappropriate to admit.
”When you know the culture, you know it’s normal, but if you don’t,
as a practitioner, you can miss a significant problem,” Dr. Lu said.
”She could easily have been turned away from the clinic that day.”
URL:
GRAPHIC: Photos: At a new Brooklyn clinic, Dr. Jason Wu, top,
examines William Hung, 4, as his father, Rong Hung, demonstrates
saying ”ah.” Sue Ng, a clinic translator, talks with Chikwan Hui, a
patient, in a waiting room decorated with Asian art. (Photographs by
Ruby Washington/The New York Times)

Panorama.am
15:10 02/06/06

SMALL AND MID SIZE BUSINESS DEVELOPING IN ARMENIA DESPITE OF
UNFAVORABLE CONDITIONS
National Center on Development of Small and Mid Size Business in
Armenia opened a new office today in Yerevan. In the words of the
executive director of the center Ishkhan Karapetyan more than 12 000
entrepreneurs received assistance from the organization from 2003 to
2005. The state subsidized 820 mln Armenian drams for that
purpose. According to I. Karapetyan small and mid size business has a
tendency to develop in Armenia with a reported 40% rate.
Despite of the fact that the center is supported by UNDP, OSCE, German
Society on Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and several others, the deputy
representative of UNDP in Armenia Alexander Avanesov thinks this is `a
government project.’ The projects will be evaluated by OSCE. `We were
so excited by incubator enterprises in Goris that we decided to fund
it,’ OSCE representative Frank Frant said. He urged donors to fund the
project requiring Euro 3000.
According to A. Avanesov, the main problems for small and mid size
businesses are their start and probability of survival. `We focus on
education but then the most important part comes – the funding. Bank
rates are high, softly speaking. On the other hand, the ministry of
trade thrice increases the guarantees for providing resources for
small and mid size businesses. Under such conditions, the banks may
lower credit conditions,’ Avanesov says.
National Center on Development of Small and Mid Size Business in
Armenia established by the decision of government in 2002. It is
called to connect small and mid size business entities with the
government structures. The Fund has representations in all the regions
of Armenia and provides financial, consulting and educational support
to business community. /Panorama.am/

PanARMENIAN.Net
Kocharian: «My Expectations of Meeting with AzeriPresident Modest»
03.06.2006 13:44 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Azerbaijan’s militant statements have nearly nothing
to do with the topic under consideration. They form an impression as
if the opposing party is not to much tuned for serious decisions in
settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Armenian President Robert
Kocharian told journalists. «We are discussing an option that, in my
opinion, will allow having a lasting peace settlement, however my
expectations of the meeting with the Azeri President are modest,»
Kocharian said.
The Armenian leader was surprised with statements of Azeri officials
that the issue should be solved within territorial integrity of
Azerbaijan and providing a certain degree of autonomy to Karabakh.
«After establishment of the UN there was no case when people, who
exercised their right to self-determination and attained de facto
independence, changed their mind and returned to being part of the
state, from which they separated. I do not understand why the Armenian
and Karabakh peoples should be the first to decide that independence
does not suit them due to some reason,» the Armenian President said,
reports Novosti-Armenia.

MORE THAN 500 BUSINESSMEN EXPECTED TO PARTICUIPATE IN 2nd ECONOMIC
FORUM ARMENIA-DIASPORA

YEREVAN, JUNE 1, NOYAN TAPAN. More than 500 businessmen will
participate in the 2nd economic forum Armenia-Diaspora in Yerevan on
September 20, 2006. Within the framework of the forum, a large
exhibition Pan-Armenian EXPO 2006 “Armenia’s Economy During 15 Years
of Independence” will be held on September 22. RA Deputy Minister of
Trade and Economic Development Tigran Davtian stated this at a press
conference on June 1. According to him, the plenary sittings of the
economic forum will be held in the Sport and Culture Center after K.
Demirchian. It is envisaged to have sittings on information and high
technologies, industry, small and medium business and tourism. 50-60
businessmen are expected to take part in the sitting on issues of
information and high technologies. T. Davtian said that in order to
ensure the participation of the maximum possible Diasporan Armenian
and foreign businessmen in the forum, an open letter-invitation of the
RA Minister of Trade and Economic Development will be disseminated in
Geneva, Brussels and Moscow through commercial representatives of
Armenia. The open letter-invitation is placed on the website
, through which the registration of the event
participants and collection of participation payments will be done. It
was announced that in case of submitting a bid until September 1, the
participation payment will make a sum in drams equivalent to 50 euros
(in 2003, the payment for participation in the 1st economic forum
Armenia-Diaspora made 100 euros). Starting September 1, the payment
will make 100 euros. The speaker noted that in 2001-2005, the Diaporan
Armenian businessmen carried out more active invetsment activities in
Armenia than previously, which was due to holding a investment forum
on Armenia in New York in 2001 and Armenia-Diaspora forums in Yerevan
in 2002. According to expert opinions presented by T. Davtian, in
1998-2004, 55-65% of foreign investors operating in Armenia had links
with the Diaspora, and their investments in the indicated period made
up 55-65% of the total amount of investments. He reminded that in
1991-2005, private foreign investments of 2 bln USD were made in
Armenia, 1 bln USD of which – in 2001-2005, while in 2005 alone,
investments amounted to 0.5 bln USD.

AZERBAIJAN WILL NEVER AGREE WITH AGGRESSORS OF AZERBAIJANI LANDS – ILHAM ALIYEV
Author: A.Mammadov
TREND, Azerbaijan
May 30 2006
The Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev properly stressed in his speech
at the meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO the necessity
of keeping the territorial integrity of his country.
“Each peaceful solution of the Karabakh problem should be based on
the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan,” told Ilham Aliyev, Trend
reports with reference to ITAR-TASS.
“We will never agree with aggressors of our lands,” stated Aliyev.
“To become national minority doesn’t mean the right to establish an
independent state,” said Ilham Aliyev.
He remembered that due to Karabakh problem 20% of Azerbaijan territory
was occupied and more that one million people became refugees in
their own country.
It is necessary to note that the chairman of the Parliamentary
Assembly of NATO Pyer Lelush expressed his regret that Armenian
president Robert Kocharyan abandoned the invitation to take part at
the meetings in Paris.

ALIYEV AND CHIRAC MEET IN PARIS
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
May 30 2006
Visiting France President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan met on May 30
with his French counterpart Jacques Chirac at Elysee Palace in Paris.
President Chirac congratulated the Azerbaijani leader on the Republic
Day and the Azeri oil’s reaching Ceyhan terminal, as well as described
the opening of new building for Azerbaijani embassy in Paris as an
important event.
At the meeting held in a sincere and friendly atmosphere, both
Presidents expressed satisfaction with current development of relations
between Azerbaijan and France.
They also touched upon the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh
problem, and activities of France as one of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE
Minsk group towards peaceful settlement of the conflict.