Category: News

A private Cessna plane has crushed in Crimea, killing four, Pravda reports.

The aircraft crashed on Wednesday night in the area of Klementieva Mount, Pravda.Ru reports with reference to LifeNews, citing a source in law enforcement bodies of the peninsula.

Four people were killed in the air crash; the causes of the tragedy are now being specified.

On November 4, a transport An-12 aircraft crashed in South Sudan, killing 39 people, 21 of them were residents of the village, on which the plane crashed.

On October 31, passenger jetliner Airbus A321 with 217 passengers and 7 crew members on board, crashed in Sinai, Egypt, leaving no survivors.

Photo by AFP    

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta has said he is resigning, a day after some 20,000 people took to the streets to protest against a nightclub fire that left 32 people dead, the BBC reports.

Friday night’s blaze in Bucharest started when a band performing at the club set off fireworks.

Demonstrators called for Mr Ponta to step down, complaining of government corruption and poor safety supervision.

Mr Ponta is already facing trial on corruption charges.

He became the first sitting Romanian prime minister to be formally accused of corruption during the summer on allegations of fraud, tax evasion and money laundering dating back several years.

He repeatedly denied the charges, accusing prosecutors of being “totally unprofessional”.

Mr Ponta said on Wednesday he was “handing in my mandate, I’m resigning, and implicitly my government too”.

“I hope the government’s resignation will satisfy the people who came out in the streets,” he said on Romanian TV.

The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has revealed the names of the crewmembers of the An-12 plane that crashed in South Sudan this morning:

Gevorg Tovmasyan
Samvel Hambartsumyan
Samvel Mkrtchyan
Armen Antonyan
Suren Petrosyan

The Ministry informs that the plane belonged to the Asia Airways.

Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema has been arrested over an alleged plot to blackmail fellow footballer Mathieu Valbuena with a sex tape, legal sources have said, reports.

The Real Madrid and France star arrived at the police station in Versailles, near Paris, early on Wednesday and was placed in detention, the local prosecutor confirmed, without giving further information.

The case also saw four other people arrested last month, including former French international footballer Disséjibril C.

Cissé took to live television the day after his arrest to insist that he was innocent.

The existence of any x-rated video involving Lyon player Valbuena and his partner, however, has not actually been confirmed.

The bodies of the eight Armenians killed in a bus crash in Russia’s Tula region will be transported to Yerevan on a charter flight on November 5, the Ministry of Transport and Communication reports.

The plane is expected to take off from Moscow at 5 p.m. local time and land at Zvartnots Airport at 8 p.m. Yerevan time.

The plane will also transport the injured passengers, whose health condition is satisfactory. The names of the passengers that will fly to Yerevan will be published tomorrow.

Those, who are currently getting treatment at medical centers in Tula will remain there as long as needed.

Arzu Geybullayeva (photo from PEN International)

 

Azerbaijan-born journalist and blogger Arzu Geybullayeva has written for major news outlets like Foreign Policy and al-Jazeera. Yet it’s her work for Agos, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper, that has led to threats from her native land, according to the

For the Istanbul-based Geybullayeva, the criticism of her work for Agos began with small Azeri outlets, and spread to Azerbaijan’s state-owned media. Eventually, Geybullayeva, who frequently blogs about human rights in Azerbaijan, received death threats online. By 2014 she realized it was no longer safe for her to return to her home country.

Among the tactics the Azeri government has used against Geybullayeva is to apply pressure to her family in Azerbaijan, a strategy it has used against other journalists and dissidents.

 

 

 

The Turkish ruling party was expected to ensure the right to form a government on its own, Giro Manoyan, Head of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Bureau’s Hay Dat and Political Affairs Office, told a press conference today, as he cpmmented on the putcome of the parlaimentary elections in Turkey.

It was clear after the July elections that Erdogan would destabilize the situation in the country to make the public cast its vote for stability, i.e. the ruling party.

According to Manoyan, Erdogan will maintain the same policy line both on the domestic and foreign policy fields.

Giro Manoyan says Turkey is rather isolated today and doubts it will solve issues on the foreign policy front. Neither will it take steps towards improvement of relations with Armenia.

“If not the issue of Syrian refugees, where Turkey is seen by many European states see as a key role- player, the country’s alienation from the West would be even deeper. The domestic polarization in Turkey will also continue, because this is what that country’s policy is based on,” Manoyan said.

As for Armenian-Turkish relations, he expects no breakthrough in the coming four years, because Turkey has a lot of internal problems to solve.

Besides, according to Manoyan, Turkey’s continues to associate its relations with Armenia with those between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and is not likely to change the policy in the near future.

“The steps connected with the Armenian community of Turkey will also be formal, while actually the discriminative policy will continue,” he said.

Manoyan added that “the three Armenian MPs that retained their seats in the Parliament will hardly be able to properly defend the interests of the Armenian community.”

Today, the Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly) called on the Department of Justice to investigate potentially illegal activities of U.S. groups with ties to foreign entities in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and the House Committee on Ethics concluded that 9 members of Congress and more than two dozen staff members accepted a trip that was improperly paid for by foreign corporations in Azerbaijan and Turkey. In addition to attending a convention in Azerbaijan, several Members of Congress and their staff also traveled to Turkey free of cost. The OCE’s review found that the congressional travel to Azerbaijan and Turkey was “not funded exclusively by the entities disclosed on travel forms submitted to the Committee on Ethics.”

A investigation discovered that Gülen groups, Turkish organizations who follow the leadership of Fethullah Gülen, “secretly funded as many as 200 trips to Turkey for members of Congress and staff since 2008, repeatedly violating House rules and possibly federal law.” Over the course of its review, the OCE obtained evidence that a Turkish organization, named the Bosphorus Atlantic Cultural Association of Friendship and Cooperation (BAKIAD), funded and coordinated the congressional travel within Turkey dating back several years.  Four of the Gülen groups sponsoring the 2013 conference in Azerbaijan also “used BAKIAD to arrange and finance all in-country expenses for congressional travel in Turkey,” OCE found. “Importantly, however, BAKIAD’s role does not appear to have been disclosed to the Committee on Ethics in 2013 or in other years.” Congressional disclosures show the Gülen-backed trips totaled more than $800,000 in free travel for lawmakers and staff. Both the Turkish and Azerbaijani Congressional Caucuses have significantly increased their membership over the last several years.

According to the USA TODAY, “A dozen different Gülen groups have sponsored congressional travel since 2008 and have filed forms with the House certifying that they were paying for the trips. The House Ethics Committee approved all the trips in advance based on the forms the Gülen groups submitted. But a USA TODAY investigation found many of those disclosures were apparently false. Some of the Gülenist groups claimed to be certified nonprofits, but they do not appear in state or IRS databases of approved charities. Groups that did register with the IRS filed tax forms indicating that they did not pay for congressional travel. And five of the groups admitted to congressional investigators earlier this year that a Gülenist group in Turkey was secretly covering the costs of travel inside Turkey for lawmakers and staff.”

The OCE investigators received documentation that the lawmakers accepted donations by two Texas-based nonprofit corporations, the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians (TCAE) and the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ). They found that TCAE and AFAZ concealed the true source of the funding for travel and other expenses for the U.S. officials. Instead, much of the cost of travel and funding for the convention was paid for by undisclosed entities including the Republic of Azerbaijan through its national oil company, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR). Evidence revealed that SOCAR founded AFAZ in the month prior to the Convention, transferring $750,000 to an AFAZ bank account.

“The revelations by the USA TODAY investigation, in addition to the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation, are remarkable,” the Assembly said in its . “We respectfully request a full and thorough investigation by the Department of Justice into these groups and the full application of the law. The reported activities constitute plainly illegal behavior and strikes at the core of our Constitutional government through blatant foreign influence peddling.”

All victims of the bus crash in Russia’s Tula region have been identified, the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Emergency Situations reports.

1. Hakob Lyudvig Alikhanyan (born in 1960)
2. Hayk Zhora Hovhannisyan
3. Hrach Artavad Badalyan (born in 1981)
4. Gagik Armenak Manukyan (born in 1961)
5. Varuzh Stepan Stepanyan (born in 1954)
6. Sartak Tsolak Nalbandyan (born in 1947)
7. Garnik Gurgen Hakobyan (born in 1961)
8. Artashes Avetik Hovhannisyan (born in 1980)

The Ministry also informs that 33 passengers are still getting treatment in different hospitals of Tula region, 11 of them in th intensive care department.

Armenian Minister of Transport and Communication Gagik Beglaryan and Minister of Healthcare Armen Muradyan will leave for Tula today to visit the crash site.

In cooperation with Russian counterparts they will organize the transportation of the bodies of the eight victims to Armenia.

In 1937, hundreds of volunteers from around the world travelled to Spain to fight Franco’s nationalists. Among them was Misak Chelebian. Eight decades later, his American grandson visited the battlefield where he died, reports. 

On Christmas Day 1936, Francisco Franco was wrestling with a problem. Before the decade was over, he would be Spain’s fascist dictator and would rule for almost four decades. But at that moment, as a mere army general at the centre of a plot to unseat the democratically elected Republican government, his troops were stuck outside Madrid, unable to take the Spanish capital – it was crucial if the coup d’état was to succeed.

At the same moment, 3,500 miles away, Misak Chelebian was boarding a steam ship in New York. It was bound for Le Havre on the north coast of France. From there, the 47-year-old American of Armenian descent would travel, along with hundreds of other anti-fascist Americans, to the Pyrenees, cross the border into Spain and after a few rudimentary instructions on how to use their simple rifles, would be pitted against Franco’s forces.

Six weeks later the fates  of these two men crossed in the valley of Jarama, in what became one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish civil war. After weeks stuck without progress to the west of Madrid, Franco opened a new front to try to cut the capital’s Mediterranean supply lines. Misak, along with thousands of his comrades-in-arms, members of the volunteer International Brigade, had come to stop him.

“I would like to think that this is his final resting place,” says Barton “Rocky” Chelbian (the family surname was later simplified) indicating an olive grove on a hillside.

A retired businessman from New Jersey, Rocky knows little of what happened to his grandfather, but almost eight decades after the two-week battle, which cost the lives of as many as 45,000 men on both sides, he has come to Spain to find out more about Misak and, as he says, to pay his respects.

At 47, Misak was not a typical recruit. Born in what is now Turkey, he had escaped the Armenian genocide of 1915. He returned to Europe to fight in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, and then again in the mid-1930s to fight Franco’s Nationalists, which were supported by Hitler’s Nazis.