Category: News

The US has indicated a shift in its campaign against Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria, including the use of direct ground raids, the BBC reports.

Defence Secretary Ash Carter said there would also be more air strikes against “high-value targets”.

Separately, the US says Iran is being invited for the first time to international talks over Syria’s war.

“We won’t hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL or conducting such missions directly, whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground,” Mr Carter said, using an alternative acronym for IS.

“We expect to intensify our air campaign, including with additional US and coalition aircraft, to target ISIL with a higher and heavier rate of strikes,” he said.

“This will include more strikes against ISIL high-value targets as our intelligence improves.”

Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty on Wednesday to federal charges of evading bank rules about large cash transactions after reaching a deal with prosecutors in a hush-money case stemming from allegations of sexual misconduct, reports.

Federal prosecutors recommended a sentence of zero to six months in prison for Hastert, but the judge said he could potentially sentence him to up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 when he is sentenced in February.

The plea to one count of “structuring” – taking money out of the bank in amounts below $10,000 to evade bank reporting rules on large cash movements – marks a dramatic downfall for someone who once ranked among the country’s most powerful politicians.

Hastert, 73, told District Judge Thomas Durkin that he knew that what he was doing was wrong in a hearing that lasted a little over 20 minutes.

“I didn’t want them to know how I intended to spend the money,” he said in a one-sentence statement.

In the plea agreement he admitted to paying $1.7 million in cash to an individual he had known for decades, in order to buy that person’s silence regarding past misconduct and to compensate for the misconduct.

The indictment and the plea do not mention sexual misconduct, but unnamed law enforcement officials have told media that the past misconduct was sexual and involved someone Hastert knew when he was a teacher and coach in Yorkville, Illinois.

A separate charge of lying to the FBI was dismissed in the case.

Gina Joseph,

The first time Detroit composer Dan Yessian was formally introduced to the unusual rhythms of Armenian music, he was just a teen. While playing clarinet for a rock and roll/jazz band, a group of musicians asked him to join their Armenian wedding band.

“I was 16. These guys were old men… who smoked stogies and drank hard liquor,” said Yessian, during an interview at the office of his award-winning musical production company Yessian Music. “I told them I didn’t know how to play Armenian music, but they said they could teach me and that I would get paid $10 for one night of playing. Now I am 71, and I am the old man.”

And, for the second time in his life he has been asked to create the music of his Armenian ancestry.

This time, however, he would be the one to compose the rhythms for what would become, “An Armenian Trilogy.”

This musical composition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide will premiere at the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 29.

Yessian was born and raised in America. But like many children of his generation, whose grandparents immigrated from Armenia to the United States, he grew up hearing the tragic stories that survived the genocide in Armenia, where 1.5 million Armenian citizens were murdered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1915.

“My grandmother used to talk about how she carried raw meat hidden under her breasts to feed her children,” said Yessian. “The pregnant women were gutted. Unborn fetuses were removed and tossed into the air,” Yessian said, in his composer notes. “(Others) were raped in front of their husbands and children. This was a cleansing not unlike the Jewish Holocaust.” When asked by the Rev. Garabed Kochakian of St. John Armenian Church in Southfield to consider writing a commemorative piece of music evocative of those dark times he did not hesitate.

“For the past 43 years, our company, Yessian Music, has been creating original music for national television commercials, movie trailers and theme parks across the world,” said Yessian, whose sons, Brian and Michael also work for the company. “This was a different kind of opportunity and a challenge I couldn’t resist -– retelling the story of my ancestors in the way I do best, through music.”

Audiences at the Macomb Center will hear three movements written for violin and piano. Performed by Korean violinist Sonia Lee and pianist Shawn McDonald –- each movement represents the years surrounding the genocide in Armenia. From the days of freedom when Armenians enjoyed the rewards of their work and loving family along with the usual struggles of life, to the fear of being marched to their death in the desert and the final movement of faith for a brighter future ahead.

“When I write music I think in very visual ways with the intent that the listener might see what I see and feel what I feel,” said Yessian, whose company produced the music for national commercials like the iconic, “Think Ford First,” or promos for television shows like, “The Blacklist,” “Sunday Night Football,” and “The Voice.”

“And so it goes without saying that ‘An Armenian Trilogy’ is my desire for you to share this journey with me from a musical, yet, cinematic perspective.”

What follows the movement, which Yessian will eventually score for an orchestra, is a multi-media concert by Michelle Andonian that showcases photographs of the period and the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings performing a new score by Alexandra du Bois.

“In the end, I’m hopeful, aside from enjoying the music it will be an informative cultural experience,” Yessiam said.

 

 

 

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party resorts to all means to get votes on November 1, political scientist Mushegh Khudaverdyan says. According to him, the decision to return Kamp Armen to the Armenian community also fits into this policy.

Turkey is currently living the most strained period of its modern history, Khudaverdyan told reporters today. “Surveys show the situation has not changed after the previous elections of June 7 and the ruling party will again fail to gain majority. Therefore, the chaos in Turkey will continue,” the political scientist said.

The expert does not exclude there will be an internal split in the Justice and Development Party after the failure, but the collapse of Erdogan’s party is unlikely.

According to Khudaverdyan, yesterday’s move to return the historic orphanage to the Armenian community was also a demonstration of “flattery.”

People, who struggled for Kamp Armen for 175 days, always hoped it would be returned, Anush Kazan Asaturoglu told Public Radio of Armenia. She did not exclude, however, that the motive behind the decision was to ensure the votes of Armenians at the forthcoming elections.

The deed to Camp Armen, a historic Armenian orphanage in Istanbul, was returned to its original owners after protests against the then owner  over the demolition of the site.

Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church Foundation, the first owner of the orphanage located in the Tuzla district of Istanbul, received the deed on Tuesday.

Asbarez  -The Genocide Education Project, the Near East Foundation and the Armenian Cultural Association of America partnered to provide an educator’s workshop at Fairleigh Dickinson University of New Jersey on October 6th. Entitled They Shall Not Perish: The Story of Near East Relief – Teaching about America’s Response to the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocides, 1915-23, the October 6 workshop unveiled the new curriculum, “They Shall Not Perish -– The Story of Near East Relief, ” and drew 30 educators and community members.

With welcoming remarks from Diana Cvitan, Director of Global Learning and Partnerships at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Karine Shnorhokian, representing the Armenian Cultural Association, educators were offered a full-day of presentations. They received training on the methodology of genocide education, historical background, the work of Near East Relief in rescuing Armenian Genocide survivors, and a familiarization with the new curriculum booklet, “They Shall Not Perish,” written by author and retired social studies teacher, Ron Levitsky, and edited and published by NEF, GenEd, and ACA.

“It’s important that students not only learn of the Ottoman Turkish government’s systematic annihilation of the Armenian population, but examine the international response” said Cohan, GenEd’s Education Director, who gave the teachers educational and historical context for using the new lesson plan. “We’re proud to present this new curriculum which brings all these elements together, offering students a unique piece of their own American history.”

Molly Sullivan, Director and Curator of Near East Relief Historical Society led teachers through an engrossing pictorial history of the Near East Relief’s efforts in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide.

Educators were also introduced to Lucine Karjian, the daughter of an Armenian Genocide survivor who lived in Bird’s Nest orphanage in Beirut, run by Near East Relief. Karjian told teachers about her parents’ genocide survival stories and how her father’s family were greatly helped by Near East Relief.

Lesson Plan on America’s Response

Ron Levitsky, lead author of the new curriculum booklet, reviewed the unit and how teachers can incorporate it into their coursework. “They (NER) bore witness to the genocide…,” said Levitsy. “These workers…became points of light in a brutal and horrific darkness.”

Workshop leaders urged teachers to introduce their students to the parallels between the Armenian Genocide prototype and the genocides which followed in the 20th and 21st centuries.

GenEd Expands Centennial-related Projects

The New Jersey workshop was part of a major GenEd drive to take advantage of the heightened attention to 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, to bring this history to as many educators and classrooms as possible.

Since fall, 2014, GenEd has provided professional development workshops and presentations to more than a dozen gatherings of educators in school districts and academic conferences, reaching hundreds of teachers and school administrators.

GenEd’s New Teaching Resources on Genocide & Memorialization

In addition, GenEd has published new curriculum for use in US and World History courses; Aside from “They Shall Not Perish,” GenEd also developed a lesson plan on the theme of “memorialization” and another on the newly expanded, “Ten Stage of Genocide.” An impactful Armenian Genocide poster was printed for distribution into Social Studies classrooms. In California, GenEd is providing expertise to help properly include this history in the state’s curriculum requirements.

Upcoming GenEd Outreach

• Oct 21: GenEd’s Education Director, Sara Cohan speaks on “The Armenian Genocide in U. S. Schools” at the Middle Tennessee State University’s annual Holocaust Studies Conference; GenEd advisory board members, Dr. Richard Hovanissian, Steven Jacobs, and Paul Bartrop are also featured speakers
• Oct 22: In collaboration with the Florida Holocaust Museum and the Florida Armenian Genocide Centennial committee, GenEd trains Tampa area middle and high school teachers.
• Oct 23-24: GenEd displays its resources at the Grassroots Conference in Los Angeles, educating Armenian-American community activists on advocating for genocide education in their local schools.
• Nov 13-14: GenEd presents an Armenian Genocide workshop and a resource booth at the National Council for the Social Studies conference in New Orleans, attended by approximately 4,000 teachers

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will attend multilateral talks on finding a political solution to the conflict in Syria in Vienna this week, a government spokeswoman has said, the BBC reports.

It will be the first time Iran – an ally of President Bashar al-Assad – has attended such a summit with the US.

Representatives of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will also attend the talks.

The main round of talks is expected to take place on Friday, but diplomats say some preparatory meetings could happen on Thursday evening.

“We have reviewed the invitation, and it was decided that the foreign minister would attend the talks,” Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said.

Egypt and Iraq also confirmed they had accepted invitations to the meeting.

Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier

This week, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert is expected to plead guilty to the charge of making secret payments to buy the silence of boys he had sexually abused when he was a high school wrestling coach. This plea deal with federal prosecutors would seal his court records, thus hiding from the public the details of the evidence against him.

Ever since 2005 when former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds exposed corruption at the highest levels of the US government, concerned citizens have been waiting impatiently for law enforcement officials to look into her shocking revelations.

Given the regrettably long silence by Washington and the mainstream US media, I believe it is time to expose once again the scandalous cover up of the claims that Turkish groups had bribed Speaker Hastert.

Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer and Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, published in The American Conservative last week the sinister details of foreign governments blackmailing Speaker Hastert.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI position after revealing to her superiors the penetration of US government entities by Turkish agents “who were seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy while sometimes engaging in illegal activity,” according to Giraldi. “The scope of the corruption allegedly involved bribery of senior government officials and congressmen, arranging for export licenses to countries that were embargoed, and the exposure of classified information,” Giraldi wrote.

In a 2009 deposition, Edmonds explained that Hastert was “one of the primary U.S. persons involved in operations and activities that are not legal, and they’re not for the interest of the United States but for the interest of foreign governments and foreign entities.” She described Hastert’s wrongdoing as: “The acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash and laundering it to make it look legal for his campaigns, and also for his personal use, in order to do certain favors and call certain — call for certain actions, make certain things happen for foreign entities and foreign governments’ interests, Turkish government’s interest and Turkish business entities’ interests.”

During the deposition, Edmonds was asked: “Did you have reason to believe that Mr. Hastert, for example, killed one of the Armenian genocide resolutions in exchange for money from these Turkish organizations?” She responded: “Yes, I do…. Correct… and not only taking money, but other activities, too, including being blackmailed for various reasons.” After retiring from the House of Representatives, Hastert worked for the Washington firm of Dickstein Shapiro as a registered lobbyist for Turkey.

Edmonds also revealed during her deposition that Hastert “used the townhouse [in Chicago] that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities. Now, whether that was being used as blackmail I don’t know, but the fact that foreign entities knew about this, in fact, they sometimes participated in some of those not maybe morally well activities in that particular townhouse that was supposed to be an office, not a house, residence, at certain hours, certain days, evenings of the week. So I can’t say if that was used as blackmail or not, but certain activities they would share. They were known.”

Edmonds told congressional investigators that on FBI phone recordings Turkish individuals boasted of their secret relationship with Hastert. “They discussed giving him tens of thousands of dollars in clandestine payments in exchange for political favors and information. Many of the transcripts involved a suspect at the city’s Turkish Consulate, as well as several members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, business entities that some FBI agents believed served as occasional covers for organized crime. Some calls appeared to be referring to drug shipments and other possible crimes,” Giraldi wrote.

“Edmonds noted that the phone taps contained repeated references to Hastert’s volte face [change of position] in the fall of 2000 over the campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. In August 2000, Speaker Hastert declared that he would support the resolution and send it to the full House for a vote. The resolution, vehemently opposed by the Turks, did indeed pass in the International Relations Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, shortly before a full House vote, Hastert withdrew it…. A senior official at the Turkish Consulate indicated in one recorded conversation that the “price for convincing Hastert to withdraw the genocide resolution would be at least $500,000,” Giraldi reported in his article.

Fifteen years later, the American public is still waiting for the US government to investigate the serious allegations of Turkish bribery and blackmail of Speaker Hastert!

The Spanish city of Aldaia (Valencia) officially recognized the Armenian Genocide on October 27.

The resolution introduced by the Armenian “Ararat” Union was put on a vote at the City Council by Spokesman for the Left Union Juanjo Llorente.

All four parties represented in the City Council unanimously voted to call the massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey “genocide” and condemn its denial.

Present at the sitting were representatives of the Armenian community and public and political figures of Spain.

Seven candidates will stand in FIFA’s presidential elections on 26 February, BBC reports.

The candidates are: Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, Musa Bility, Jerome Champagne, Gianni Infantino, Michel Platini, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa and Tokyo Sexwale.

Trinidadian ex-footballer David Nakhid was not included on the list, despite saying he had submitted his candidacy.

The election is to find a successor to the suspended Sepp Blatter, who is under criminal investigation.

The Swiss 79-year-old announced he would be stepping down in June, with world football’s governing body at the centre of a corruption scandal.

 

With a score of 28 Armenia is ranked as a free country in a fresh released by the Freedom House.

Georgia is another post-Soviet country rated as “free.” Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are partly free, while Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are rated as “not free.”

The report says the internet penetration rate in Armenia has continued improving over the past few years, alongside improvements in the stability of the internet’s infrastructure and relatively few restrictions on online content. Additionally, citizen groups and NGOs have made use of online communication tools to promote and organize campaigns, particularly surrounding the protests in Yerevan against hikes in electricity prices in mid-2015.

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the internet penetration rate reached 46 percent by the end of 2014, compared with 42 percent in 2013 and just 15 percent in 2009. The Public Service Regulatory Committee of Armenia estimates the rate slightly higher, at 50 percent in 2014.

The mobile penetration rate in Armenia was 116 percent as of 2014,and the number of mobile broadband subscriptions is also growing. As of December 2014, broadband subscriptions reached 257,610, an increase of 16,934 compared with of the same period in 2013

There have been no reports of restrictions on internet access imposed by the government or temporary disconnections from the internet since June 2014. In practice, the Armenian government and the telecommunication regulatory authority, the PSRC, do not interfere with or try to influence the planning of network topology. Operators plan and develop their networks without any coordination with either the government or the regulatory authority. Moreover, the regulatory authority requires service providers to indicate any technological restrictions in their public offers. Armenian internet users enjoy access to internet resources without limitation, including peer-to-peer networks, voice and instant messaging services.

Armenian internet users are able to access a wide array of content online, though online media outlets based within the country are subject to financial and political pressures. Currently, self-censorship is not a widespread practice in the online sphere. The Armenian government and the ruling political elite have not applied extralegal measures to prevent political opponents or independent internet resources from publishing online content.

Technical attacks against government websites and civil society groups continue, with most of the attacks originating from the “Anti-Armenia” group based in Azerbaijan.

In addition, Turkish hackers from the Turk Hack Team group claimed that they launched DDoS attacks against websites of the Armenian government, as well as Armenian business and media sites, causing disruptions on April 24, the Armenian Genocide commemoration day. However, there were no interruptions recorded by these entities.

Freedom on the Net 2015 finds internet freedom around the world in decline for a fifth consecutive year as more governments censored information of public interest while also expanding surveillance and cracking down on privacy tools.