Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan has sent a telegram of condolences to his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Margvelashvili over the deadly floods in Tbilisi, which left more than 10 people dead and many missing and caused destruction.
President Sargsyan offered his sincere support to Giorgi Margvelashvili and the friendly people of Georgia and extended words of regret to the families and friends of the victims.
A Construction company in London has been sentenced after pleading guilty to safety failings after a 55 year old employee fell through a skylight roof, the Health and Safety Executive, Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety, informs on its webpage.
Southwark Crown Court heard that Armenian national, Petros Pogosyan fell through a skylight from a unit roof on a London industrial estate while working for Race Interiors Ltd on 18 January 2013.
Mr Pogosyan fell four and half meters on to a concrete floor at Unit 1, Roseberry Industrial Estate, London and suffered life changing injuries including a fractured back. He is now partially deaf, has damage to his brain, is paralysed from the waist down and psychologically traumatised.
During the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prosecution case, the court was told he will need personal care for the rest of his life, and will never work again. His wife has given up work to care for him full time. Since the incident the couple have been living on state benefits.
Judge May QC described the accident as highly foreseeable, pointing out there was no protection to prevent a fall from or through the roof. She ruled that the company fell far short of the required standards for managing risks at work as the supervisor was not trained and there was a complete lack of planning with no risk assessment or method statement for the work.
HSE inspector Simon Hester said: “This tragedy should not have happened. Nobody should work on a roof without proper planning.
“It is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that all reasonable precautions are taken to prevent a fall. Mr Pogosyan could have been killed by his fall and now suffers massive and irreversible life-changing injuries.”
Race Interiors Limited was fined £60,000 with costs of £7,784 after pleading guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
However, in a highly unusual move the fine was converted into a compensation order of £60,000 to be paid directly to Mr Pogosyan. The judge described this as “an exceptional case” as Race Interiors are in dispute with its insurance company and Mr Pogosyan is unlikely, if at all, to receive compensation for his injuries.
In a statement released on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis calls on Turkey, the United States and Israel to recognize the Genocide, the reports.
The Massachusetts Board of Rabbis reaches out in solidarity and sorrow to Armenians everywhere on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. We acknowledge the pain carried through generations of a people decimated, the psychic scars transmitted, the truncated branches of family trees yet to regenerate. We hear the echoes of pleading voices long stilled that call us to remember, to learn, to witness. We call for universal recognition of what happened on the plains of Anatolia, the 1915-23 atrocities carried out by the Ottoman government. Only truth shall be surety for the timeless cry of “Never Again.”
Details unfold as a scroll of lamentation, these we remember and pour our hearts out. We remember the hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, the writers, artists, doctors and lawyers, the communal and political leaders arrested and executed on April 24, 1915. We remember the desert death marches, the killing squads, and the concentration camps. We remember the 1.5 million Armenians killed of some 2 million in their ancestral homeland prior to World War I, mourning the destruction and exile of an ancient people. We remember the use of trains for deportation to death, cattle cars packed with human beings, portent of genocide to come. We remember the heroic efforts of American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, the missionaries and aid workers who cried out to the world for response. We remember the continuing denials and the shame of refusing to recognize what happened, to call it for what it was.
We remember words that challenge silence and disallow denial. Words of witness by Ambassador Morgenthau, laying bare the plan by its architect, Talat Pasha: “It is no use for you to argue…we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians…we have got to finish with them…” Igniting the flames of one genocide from the embers of another, Adolph Hitler, his memory be blotted out, cynically asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” We honor with pride and humility the work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who did speak, who coined the word “genocide” in 1943, his long-held anguish for Armenians merging in the midst of the Holocaust with anguish for his own people.
We take to heart Elie Wiesel’s lament for the “double killing” of Armenians that happens through silence. Challenging Turkey to acknowledge what happened, it is our challenge, as well. Recognition of another’s suffering and willingness to describe it accurately should never be a matter of political expediency. The prevention of future genocides rests with our willingness to acknowledge those of the past. As the Holocaust should not be subsumed within the Second World War, neither should the Armenian Genocide be subsumed within the First World War.
We call on Turkey to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Heirs to the Ottomans, Turkey’s burden is also an opportunity to insure that what happened 100 years ago will no longer define the relationship today between descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators. We call on the United States to unequivocally recognize the Armenian Genocide, affirming our commitment to justice and giving meaning to annual expressions of condolence and sorrow. We call on Israel to unequivocally recognize the Armenian Genocide, giving voice to the moral legacy of its own emergence from the ashes of the Holocaust.
Toward healing among communities and peoples:
We call on the American Jewish community through its official organizations to unequivocally recognize the Armenian Genocide, to apologize for past reticence, to reach out from heart to heart.
We call on local Jewish communities to learn about the Armenian Genocide and to reach out to their Armenian neighbors, building friendship and cooperation.
We call on all people to refrain from manipulating past horrors to demonize members of any people or faith today, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
In the midst of Anatolia where the Biblical Mount Ararat rises, Noah’s ark found rest, a dove with its olive branch still waiting to alight. To give rest to the dead and peace to the living, a rainbow promise of never again, the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis calls for universal recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein on Tuesday called to rethink Israel’s stance on the Armenian genocide, calling the murders a “moral stain” on humanity, the reports.
“History cannot be changed,” he said during a speech in the Knesset. “The disaster can’t be obscured by diplomacy anymore.”
Armenia recently marked the centenary of a mass killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915, at the height of World War I.
“It is no secret that Israel has taken an ambivalent position about the genocide,” Edelstein said, calling Israel’s reaction “too hesitant and too restrained.”
“As the Jewish people, we cannot stay silent,” he addressed MKs in the plenum. “We cannot turn a blind eye or lessen the extent of the Armenian tragedy,”
Dear compatriots,
I cordially congratulate you on the occasion of Victory and Peace Day.
Today is a special jubilee day. It marks the 70th anniversary of the historic victory in the Great Patriotic War. It was the crushing blow of the multinational Soviet army that decided the outcome of the war in Europe in May 1945.
From fighting on the frontline and in guerilla detachments to getting involved in underground and resistance activities, Armenians brought their contributions towards the total defeat of Nazi forces. We struggled in the trench of justice, freedom and humanism against an anti-humanistic ideology, violence and vandalism. By fighting heroically on various fronts and working in the rear day and night, we thus defended our homeland, Armenia, as well.
This victory afforded the Armenian people who had survived the genocide real and broad opportunities for peaceful work and reconstruction and for their total revival.
It was a symbolic coincidence that on the same day in May 1992 the ancient Armenian fortress town of Sushi was liberated. Following the example of their fathers and grandfathers, our modern-day heroes repeated their ancestors’ feat, fighting in the same trench of justice, freedom and humanism against Armenophobia, violence and vandalism.
I once again congratulate all of us on this great holiday. Peace to the world and peace to our country!
The Faster Times
May 22 2010
Armenian Bloggers Seize Influence With the Power of ¦ Live Journal?
May 22, 2010
by Nicholas Clayton
When the Live Journal `virtual community’ first came online in 1999,
it basically operated as a venue for whiny American middle-schoolers
to overshare, write bad poetry and meet pedophiles. At least that’s
how I saw it. I was in middle school at the time.
Ten years later, after Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and
iPhones apps seemed to have successively killed off the first
generation of blog platforms and social networks, I was stunned to
find that not only was Live Journal not extinct, but was in fact an
influential vehicle for grass roots activism, social discussion and
independent news sharing in Armenia ‘ a country lacking in all three.
Armenia is rated `partly free’ on democracy and `not free’ on the
status of its freedom of the press by Washington-based pro-democracy
NGO Freedom House. According to internetworldstats.com little over six
percent of Armenia’s population uses the internet, while most turn to
exclusively pro-government broadcast media for information. But for
Armenians, seeing isn’t believing.
According to the OSCE, 10 people were killed March 2008 when the
government violently dispersed protesters who disputed presidential
elections widely considered to be fraudulent. The mainstream media
coverage of this event, however, proved to be to a total
pro-government wash, causing confidence in media institutions to
plummet and blogging boomed.
Today, Armenia’s most popular bloggers get tens of thousands of page
views a day while the average circulation of Yerevan’s many newspapers
is around 3,000 each. The community of approximately 500 live journals
and stand-alone blogs has become an active force in Armenian society,
meeting in person and in cyberspace to organize petition campaigns and
flash mobs to protest local policies and use their growing influence
to spread information.
The government has taken notice.
Artur Papyan, creator of the Armenian Observer Blog, said government
officials have hired staffs of consultants to deal with the phenomenon
and many high-ranking officials have created blogs of their own. And,
earlier this month, when unveiling a controversial new proposal to
create a small number of foreign language schools in Armenia, Armenian
Education Minister Armen Ashotyan held a nearly 3-hour-long meeting
with various bloggers to present the government’s plan.
This makes Armenia a unique case as blogging in the other two
countries of the Caucasus region, Georgia and Azerbaijan, largely
reflects each of the countries’ respective political environments. In
pro-Western Georgia, where freedom of expression is arguably the most
respected, the number of blogs is higher, but the blogging community
has a much smaller impact on the political dialogue, and in
dictatorial Azerbaijan nearly all blogs are apolitical ‘ with two
political bloggers already having been sent to prison for
`hooliganism.’
In Armenia, meanwhile, the contrast between the country’s largely
closed political and media society and the level to which new media
has been able to drive the discourse is striking.
Not all Armenians are optimistic about the future of its small,
influential blogging community, however. Anna Simonyan, one of the
founders of the online magazine Yerevan.ru, which heavily incorporates
blogging into its interactive format, believes that Facebook,
currently the fastest growing social network in Armenia, will
gradually usurp the discussion. Independent bloggers will either be
disempowered, or will take salaried positions in media organizations
and will be gradually brought into the fold, as very few have made any
real advertising money from their blogging exploits.
But information security analyst and blogger Samvel Martirosyan
disagrees. He said that Yerevan’s blogging community is already seeing
a collaboration between individuals using both Live Journal and
Facebook.
`It is a real cooperation; Facebook is good for activism, but blogs
are better for brainstorming, creating ideas,’ he said. `Platform is
nothing, the idea is everything.’
In the end, although Armenia’s levels of internet penetration affects
the impact of new media activism within its borders, it hasn’t been an
obstacle for the overall consumption of blogs as much of the existing
Armenian blogosphere is geared more towards the larger, more
internet-savvy Armenian diaspora, which greatly outnumbers the
population of the small Caucasus nation of 3.5 million.
With issues like the normalization of ties with Turkey, resolving the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan and balancing the influence
of America, Russia and Iran on the country’s politics and economy ‘
issues on which residents and diaspora are often fiercely divided ‘
there’s bound to be plenty to talk about and plenty of places to do it
for years to come.
To keep seeing more updates on Armenia and more, check out TFT’s
membership plans!
Become a Member of The Faster Times today for as little $12 and you’ll
receive lots of great gifts ‘ plus the good feeling that comes with
supporting a team of independent journalists who are trying to create
a new model for the newspaper. (Sign up right away to make sure you
receive an invite to our first members-only event).
/22/armenian-bloggers-seize-influence-with-the-pow er-of-live-journal/
RA GOVERNMENT TO SIGN AGREEMENT ON CREDITING CONSTRUCTION OF ZVARTNOTS AIRPORT’S NEW PASSENGER TERMINAL
PanARMENIAN.Net
May 20, 2010 – 19:54 AMT 14:54 GMT
The Armenian government authorized the General Department of Civil
Aviation to sign a loan agreement on crediting the second stage of
the new passenger terminal’s construction. The loan agreement will
be signed by the RA government, Armenia International Airports CJSC
(Zvartnots), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian
Development Bank and German Investments and Development Company.
ARMENIAN DELEGATION TO "TRANSPORT AND INNOVATION: DISCOVERING ABILITIES" FORUM
Panorama.am
11:40 21/05/2010
Economy
German city of Leipzig will host on May 26-28 transport international
forum on "Transport and innovation: discovering abilities" which will
be attended by Armenian Minister of Transport Manuk Vardanyan and
the delegation chaired by him, press speaker of Transport Ministry
Susanna Tonoyan told Panorama.am.
International forum of transport is a part of the organization
on economic cooperation and development. The forum is a chance to
find solutions to many questions and to hold panel discussions over
transport innovations.
In the frames of the forum on May 27 transport ministers of different
countries are supposed to have a meeting.
INITIATORS OF OPENING FOREIGN-LANGUAGE SCHOOLS LACK STATE-ORIENTED MODE OF THINKING: VAZGEN MANUKYAN
Tert.am
16:26 21.05.10
It would be the greatest disillusion to consider the language as
simply a school subject or just a means of communication between
human beings. The language and the mode of thinking typical to a
particular language have spiritual and genetic roots, President of
the Public Council Vazgen Manukyan writes in a statement referring
to a pending bill proposed by the Ministry of Education and Science
that envisage reopening foreign-language schools in Armenia.
"Unable to develop a proper policy in educational system those
responsible want to hand in the sector, that is of significant
importance for our future, to foreigners. This testifies to the fact
that those responsible lack a state-oriented mode of thinking" reads
the statement.
Further it says that foreign-language schools will bring with them
a foreign educational system, foreign mode of thinking, foreign
psychology and a foreign world outlook.
RA GOVERNMENTAL DELEGATION PARTICIPATES IN THE EURASEC SESSION
ARMENPRESS
MAY 21, 2010
SAINT PETERSBURG
Governmental delegation headed by the Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan
left today for Saint Petersburg on a working visit to participate in
the 26th session of the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) on the
level of heads of governments and in the session of the heads of the
CIS states.
The delegation consists of head of the government’s staff David
Sargsyan, Finance Minister Tigran Davtyan, Deputy Foreign Minister
Shavarsh Kocharyan, Deputy Economy Minister Mushegh Tumasyan and
other officials.
After the narrow meeting of the heads of governments the meeting will
continue "1+2+4" format. Members of the organization are Russia,
Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, observers
are Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine.
On behalf of the Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin a working
dinner will be served followed with the session of the heads of
governments of the CIS countries the agenda of which includes more
than 20 document drafts.
Among the core issues to be discussed is the economic cooperation
block. The heads of executive bodies will discuss the decision on prior
events of implementation of cooperation concept in the energy sphere.
The prime ministers will approve the declaration on formation of
phases of electricity market. The prime ministers will point the out
the place and time of conduction of the next session.