Category: News

Real Salt Lake has acquired FW Yura Movsisyan as a Designated Player via loan from FC Spartak Moscow in the Russian Premier League, General Manager Craig Waibel announced today.  The 28-year-old striker returns to RSL – pending receipt of his ITC from the Russian Federation – after winning MLS Cup with the Claret-and-Cobalt in his final match with the club in 2009, the State of Utah’s lone major professional sports championship since 1973.

“For me, it’s been a long time I’ve been wanting to come back,” said Movsisyan, whose 2016 RSL jersey will reprise the #14 he wore with the Utah side from 2007-09. “Obviously Salt Lake was my first choice because it was such a great place for me and my family.  I felt at home in Utah.  Leaving with a championship – I want to come back and do that again.

“I want to win more championships with Salt Lake – with the club that I was part of the evolution.  I was part of the team that went basically from the bottom to being champions.  This is what I want to do again and what I’m excited about.  For me, it’s an amazing thing to come back.”

The 2016 season will mark the Armenian International’s second stint with RSL, having previously played with Real Salt Lake from 2007-2009, coming to Utah via trade with the then-Kansas City Wizards.  In three MLS campaigns on the Wasatch Front, Movsisyan played 53 regular-season matches with the Claret-and-Cobalt, scoring 15 goals while helping RSL to the 2009 MLS Cup title.

Movsisyan owns the distinction of notching a stoppage-time equalizer at Colorado in the 2008 regular-season finale to vault RSL into the postseason for the first time, and notching the club’s first-ever playoff goal a week later against the club’s expansion brethren CD Chivas USA.  Movsisyan currently ranks sixth overall in club history with 15 MLS regular-season goals scored.

“Yura is a goalscorer,” said Waibel, the former MLS Cup and Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup Champion now in his first full year as RSL General Manager. “He’s always been a goalscorer and statistically speaking, his numbers are undeniably productive no matter where he’s played.  He’s at an age right now and at a point of his life right now, he had a priority with his wife that they wanted to move back to the States.  Everything just added up to make sense for him to come.  We have an undeniable interest to bring in good soccer players and goalscorers and Yura is one of those.  We believe he’s a double-digit goalscorer and we’re really excited to get him back out on the field and start producing.”

On 10 November 2015, the European Court of Human Rights communicated the case of Mamikon Khojoyan, a 77-year-old Armenian citizen who inadvertently crossed the border into Azerbaijan in 2014, the  NGO reports.

He was allegedly held by Azerbaijani authorities for over a month, and subjected to torture and ill-treatment by a group of unknown persons on the basis of national and religious hatred. He died two months after he was handed over to Armenian authorities and returned home. The applicants in this case, Mr Khojoyan’s three children, are represented by the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, based at Middlesex University, and the Foundation Against the Violation of Law, Yerevan.

Mr Khojoyan lived in the village of Verin Karmir Aghbyur in Armenia, close to the border with Azerbaijan. On the morning of 28 January 2014, he told his family that he was going to collect grapes in the field. The state border in the region is not marked. Later that day, video footage appeared of him surrounded by a group of people, including someone in Azerbaijani military uniform. He appeared unharmed. Two days later, the Azerbaijani News Service conducted an interview with him, in which his arm appeared broken. It was reported that he was in detention, having been apprehended for being part of an Armenian sabotage group. A news report broadcast on the following day showed that he had difficulties standing up and that his left eye had been injured.

Over a month later, on 4 March 2014, Mr Khojoyan was handed back to the Armenian authorities at the border, as a result of mediation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. When his children visited him in the Armenian hospital, he was incoherent and extremely frightened. He told them he had been taken to Baku, where he had been beaten, forced to sleep on a concrete floor, had salt poured into his wounds, received injections and had his head burned with incandescent metal. A forensic examination showed traces of petroleum and psychotropic (perception-altering) drugs in his blood and urine. Mr Khojoyan died in his home on 20 May 2014, six weeks after he was discharged from the hospital.

The applicants complain that their father was subjected to physical violence and was injected with drugs during his detention, which constituted torture and degrading treatment, and posed a danger to his life, serious breaches of Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They argue that this treatment eventually led to his death. They also claim a violation of the procedural aspects of both Articles as there was no investigation by Azerbaijan into the circumstances of Mr Khojoyan’s detention and treatment. With regards to their own mental suffering, they claim that seeing their father’s injuries on television and the internet both during his detention and after his release constitutes an additional violation of Article 3.

Moreover, Mr Khojoyan’s children argue that their elderly father was unlawfully deprived of liberty during his five week detention, and was not informed of the reasons why he had been detained; nor was he brought before a judge. With regards to this and the above violations, they maintain that they did not have an effective remedy (Article 13 ECHR). Finally, they claim that their rights, and the rights of their father, were violated by the Azerbaijani authorities because of his ethnic Armenian origin, a violation of the prohibition of discrimination (Article 14 ECHR).

The Azerbaijani Government is due to respond to the allegations and the Court’s questions by 8 March 2016.

– Picasso Bust at the center of custody battle between American Armenian art dealer Gagosian and the Qatar Royal Family.

The high-powered art dealer Larry Gagosian says he bought it. The royal family of Qatar says it bought the sculpture, too. And now they are facing off in court over who owns Picasso’s important plaster bust of his muse (and mistress) Marie-Thérèse Walter, a star of the Museum of Modern Art’s popular “Picasso Sculpture” show.

The seller, in both cases, was Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso, 80. She declined to comment on why she appears to have sold the artwork twice.

In a legal action filed on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan against the Qatari family’s agent, Mr. Gagosian claims that he bought the 1931 sculpture in May 2015 for about $106 million from Ms. Widmaier-Picasso, and then sold it to an undisclosed New York collector who expects to receive it after MoMA’s show closes on Feb. 7.

But the Qatari family’s agent, Pelham Holdings, run by Guy Bennett, maintains in its own court documents that it secured an agreement with Ms. Widmaier-Picasso to buy the work in November 2014 for 38 million euros, or about $42 million.

The bust, a major work from a highly creative period in Picasso’s life, reflects the evolution of a new erotic style of curves and exaggerated forms inspired by Walter’s charms.

The conflict exposes the stubbornly elusive nature of an increasingly competitive art market, in which deals are made behind closed doors and ownership can be ambiguous.

The case is further complicated by the particular nature of Picasso’s family, which includes a multitude of wives, muses, children and grandchildren who over the years have wrangled over the patriarch’s valuable creations, and in many cases sold off works.

In the action filed Tuesday against Pelham, the Gagosian Gallery asked a judge to “quiet” any challenges or claims to its title of the bust.

“We bought and sold the sculpture in good faith without knowledge of the alleged claim,” the gallery said in a statement, referring to Pelham’s lawsuit. “We are entirely confident that our purchase and sale are valid and that Pelham has no rights to the work.”

Mr. Gagosian has a longstanding relationship with members of the Picasso family, having collaborated with Diana Widmaier-Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, on a show of Picasso’s sculptures at Mr. Gagosian’s uptown New York gallery in 2003.

The dealer added in court papers that he “did not learn anything” about Pelham’s claim to the work until later that month, when Pelham — realizing that the disputed sculpture was in the MoMA show — alerted Mr. Gagosian that it had a “priority claim” to the work.

Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, said he had no comment on the case.

Experts say the dispute casts a shadow over a prized piece of art history. “It’s regrettable that this has come to a quarrel between dealers and collectors,” said John Richardson, Picasso’s longtime biographer. “It’s a major work by Picasso.”

Since late November, Pelham says it has been trying to get the Gagosian Gallery to provide information regarding the sale.

“They continue to obfuscate the relevant facts,” Pelham charges.

Mr. Gagosian made clear that his dispute is with the Qataris’ representative, not the royal family. “We have the highest respect for Sheik al Thani, a longtime friend of the Gallery,” the dealer said in a statement, “and regret that he has been unfairly drawn into this matter.”

Borussia Dortmund’s Henrikh Mkhitaryan gave a lucky BVB Fan his shirt after the game against Wolfsburg.

Henrikh ran to the south stand and gave his shirt to a fan waving the Armenian tricolor.

AP – Backed by relentless Russian airstrikes, Syrian troops and allied militiamen on Wednesday pushed deeper into a major rebel stronghold in the northwestern province of Latakia, a day after seizing a key rebel-held town in the strategic region overlooking the coast, the government and opposition activists said.

The insurgents in the opposition-held area near the Turkish border were collapsing after the town of Salma fell to government loyalists late Tuesday. Salma’s fall marked one of the most significant military victories by the Syrian military since Russia began airstrikes in the country last September to shore up President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Later Wednesday, the Free Syrian Army and 33 other factions and rebel groups issued a statement saying they would reject scheduled peace talks in Geneva later this month unless humanitarian conditions mentioned in a U.N. resolution for Syria are fulfilled.

The groups — including the powerful Army of Islam — said that clauses specified in the resolution that call for allowing humanitarian aid to populations in need of it, must first be met.

“We reject going ahead with any negotiations before implementation of humanitarian clauses in U.N. Security Council resolution 2254 begins,” the statement said.

Syria’s main political group in exile, the Syrian National Coalition, said the statement was not final and did not mean negotiations were completely off.

“I think it’s good for them to use such a statement to put some pressure on the Russian or Iranians to push Assad to start implementing confidence building measures,” said SNC vice president Hisham Marwah.

The U.N. has been urging the belligerents in Syria’s five-year-conflict to the negotiating table on Jan. 25 in an effort to find a resolution to a civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced half the country’s population. High-level U.S., Russian, U.N. and other diplomats are meeting behind closed doors in Geneva to discuss efforts to those talks.

Later, the International Committee of the Red Cross urged all side to end sieges being carried out across the country because of “because of overwhelming humanitarian needs.”

“The appeal comes after access was granted earlier this week to three towns in the country which have been under siege for months. The populations in all three areas were found to be living in appalling conditions,” ICRC said.

Meanwhile, fighting inside Syria on Wednesday saw government troops seizing the villages of Mrouniyah and Marj Kawkah near Salma as they continued their advances in the region, aided by immense Russian firepower.

Salma, part of mountainous chains near the border with Turkey known as Jabal al-Akrad and Jabal al-Turkmen, has been under rebel control for the past three years.

The town, where members of Assad’s Alawite minority sect once co-existed with majority Sunni Muslims, overlooks the largely Alawite coast and is about 12 kilometers (seven miles) away from the Turkish border. Turkey is a key supporter of insurgents in the area, which is mostly inhabited by Syrian Turkmen, an ethnic minority with close ties to Turkey.

“Whoever controls Salma gains control all those surrounding areas which it overlooks,” said Zakariya Ahmad, an opposition activist in the nearby Idlib province.

He said the town fell after 93 days of fighting and daily barrel bombs and airstrikes. He said activists in the region had reported 92 airstrikes believed to be Russian on Salma in the last 24 hours before it was fully seized by government troops.

“It was hell on earth,” he said.

Salma’s recapture further improves Assad’s position ahead of the planned peace talks, the latest in a string of military achievements by the government recently, supported by Russian air power and Lebanon’s Shiite militant Hezbollah group.

On 15 January Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan received defense minister of the Republic of Armenia Seyran Ohanyan, NKR President’s Press Office reported.

A number of issues related to army building and cooperation between the two Armenian states in this sphere were discussed during the meeting.

NKR defense minister Levon Mnatsakanyan was present at the meeting.

Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

– Investigative reporter Dawn Anahid MacKeen’s latest story is one her mother always wanted her to tell. It’s about her grandfather and how he survived the 1915 Armenian genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians living in modern-day Turkey were killed. (Turkey doesn’t recognize the slaughter as a genocide, but says they were the result of widespread conflict across the region.) In journals that became the seeds of MacKeen’s new book, The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey, her grandfather told the story of how he escaped a forced march through the desert.

Before she read those journals, MacKeen’s knowledge of her grandfather was limited to what her mother had shared. She tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro, “They were very sad stories of this man who was struggling across a desert and was just fighting for his survival and was so thirsty he had to drink his own urine, which is a very strange thing to hear as a child and it just sounded really gross. And of course it was history that I couldn’t comprehend until I was in my 30s and I could finally read his first-hand testimony.”

Interview Highlights

On her decision to retrace her grandfather’s steps through Turkey and the Syrian desert

I had to see the land that he wrote about. You know, the desert that he was driven across with his caravans, it became a prison to him because it was inhospitable and there weren’t many people around. And as I traveled from west to east and the land grew more stark — it was a hard moment to see that, to think of my grandfather outside in the elements. You know, at one point when he was in a makeshift camp in what is now Western Syria, a thousand people died from disease in just one month. So this was the kind of thing he was up against and he really had to summon heroic strength inside to have the courage to continue each day.

On visiting the Syrian city of Raqqa before it was controlled by ISIS and decades after her grandfather was there

My experience in Raqqa … was the complete opposite of what you’re hearing now from there. It was, in a way, a haven for me just like it was for my grandfather. … When I arrived there, I met this Bedouin sheikh and he took me into his home and gave me his daughter’s room and that night hosted this dinner on the Euphrates. And there were Armenians there, there were Bedouins, Arabs — everyone was around a table enjoying each other’s company. There wasn’t this religious divide or hatred that you see. And it just breaks my heart seeing what’s happening to Raqqa and also that many people are learning of Raqqa for the first time through this message of hate.

On finding the clan that had saved her grandfather in Raqqa

This sheikh also, when I met him, I told him about what happened to my grandfather. And the people in this region know what happened to the Armenians. These stories have been handed down in their families of, you know, the mass graves that have been in that area or the Armenians that were taken in by the different clans. And when I told this Bedouin sheikh in Raqqa that I wanted to find the clan that saved my grandfather’s life and it was somewhere in the region, this sheikh all of the sudden called someone else and this person came over and all of the sudden had two phone lines and started calling all over the region to try and find this clan. And it was an incredible moment for me to watch this happen because it was really a pipe dream to try to find this clan and all of the sudden they narrowed it down and they said, “We found them. Can you go tomorrow?” And I said, “Yes! Please, please, take me to them.”

On how the war in Syria has put that clan in the same position her grandfather was in

I do keep in touch with the clan that saved my grandfather’s life. And now, since the war began, communication has become really difficult but one of them has left the region and became a refugee just like my grandfather. … He made it to Europe and was part of the sea of refugees, you know, going … from Turkey to Greece. … And he’s trying to start his life anew there, just like my grandfather did when he came to [the U.S.] many years ago. …

I could never have predicted this. First of all, finding them was one of the most wonderful moments of my life. But then when the war broke out and one of them told me — dealing with famine and seeing corpses in the street — he said, “We now know what your grandfather went through.” … And it just — I don’t even know what to say. It’s heartbreaking because I don’t want anyone else to ever have to go through what my grandfather went through. … We have to stop having history repeat itself.

On what her grandfather did after the genocide

He came to New York with my mother and my aunt in 1930 and he opened a candy store on 133rd [Street] and Amsterdam [Avenue] and he worked around the clock. And then during World War II, he moved to Los Angeles and they kind of steadily started investing. He bought a few apartment buildings, and by the time he was in his 80s he was still climbing onto the roof and fixing things. … He achieved his dream in the United States and was always so happy to be here, he would play God Bless America on his accordion.

Today, the newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Arab Republic of Egypt Tarek Ibrahim Muhammad Maati presented his credential to President Serzh Sargsyan.

The President congratulated the Ambassador on the commencement of his diplomatic mission in our country and expressed hope that during his tenure he will use his experience and knowledge for furthering and strengthening relations of the two friendly states. Serzh Sargsyan noted with satisfaction that in recent years the Armenian-Egyptian relations have entered a new phase and underscored that the existing great potential in the cooperation of the two countries should be utilized to the fullest, which can be considerably boosted by the reciprocal high-level visits, active political dialogue, frequent contacts and cooperation at the intergovernmental and interparliamentary levels.

Ambassador Tarek Maati assured that he would do his best to strengthen the relations between the two states and to develop cooperation in all areas of mutual interest. He said that he has already had discussions with the Armenian colleagues on the possibility of restarting the work of the Armenian-Egyptian intergovernmental commission this year and added that he is hopeful that the activities of the commission will invigorate the trade and economic relations. The Ambassador concurred with the President of Armenia on the issue regarding the necessity to strengthen relations between the legislatures of the two countries and creation of the friendship groups in both Parliaments.

The parties underscored the special role of the Armenian diaspora of Egypt in strengthening the friendly relations between Armenia and Egypt.

The President of Armenia wished success to the newly appointed Ambassador of Egypt throughout his tenure.

The Azerbaijani side used artillery weapons of different caliber, HAN-17 and RPG-7 grenades as it fired about 600 shots in the direction of the Armenian positions last night.

The special forces of the Azerbaijani army also undertook an incursion attempt in the eastern direction of the line of contact.

The front divisions of the NKR Defense Army were quick to spot the advancement of the rival and took relevant retaliatory measures, leaving at least to Azeri servicemen killed.

The NKR Defense Army has incurred no losses as a result of the exchange of fire.

The front divisions of the NKR Defense Army keep full control of the situation at the line of contact and confidently perform their military task.

Twelve academics in Turkey have been arrested for denouncing military operations against Kurdish rebels in the south-east, while more than 130 academics face criminal charges just days after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan slammed the signatories for making “terrorist propaganda,” the Hurrieyt Daily News reports.

Universities and prosecutor’s offices across the country started to launch probes against some of the 1,128 local and international academics and intellectuals that fall within the state’s jurisdiction, arguing the contents of the petition were beyond the limits of academic freedoms.

In a dawn operation in the northwestern province of Kocaeli on Jan. 15, police raided the houses of 19 academics and detained 14 who were at their declared addresses.

Two more will be detained once they arrive in the city while five others are being sought by police, Provincial Police Head Levent Yarımel told the press.