Category: News

Malaysian authorities have detained four tourists – two Canadians, a Briton and one Dutch national – for allegedly stripping naked on Mount Kinabalu, an act some locals say angered tribal spirits and caused a deadly earthquake, officials said, AFP reports.

Pictures of 10 naked tourists had spread on social media and infuriated locals following the 6.0-magnitude quake that struck near the mountain on Friday and killed 18 people. Six other tourists are still apparently at large, according to police.

Mount Kinabalu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular climbing destination, is considered sacred by Malaysia’s Kadazan Dusun tribal group, who believe it is a resting place for spirits.

“We detained all four of them on Tuesday … and yes we are still searching for the other six tourists, and we will catch them,” said Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman, the police commissioner for the Malaysian State of Sabah where the mountain is located.

Jalaluddin said those detained might be charged for causing public nuisance.

Sabah Provincial Tourism Minister Masidi Manjun tweeted that legal proceedings against the four foreigners had begun and that they would be remanded for four days.

Arsenal and Manchester United target Matteo Darmian is on the verge of joining Bayern Munich from Torino, it has been claimed, accoring to .

The 25-year-old Italian international has grabbed headlines this summer as a number of top clubs are involved in a mad scramble to acquire his signature.

Arsenal and Manchester United have maintained a long term interest in the full-back and were hoping to take him to England this summer but the German powerhouses seemed to have beaten them to the post.

German champions Bayern Munich have been on his trail and it has been claimed that they are on the verge of clinching Darmian’s signature.

According to Italian daily Tuttosport, the Bavarians are close to agreeing a deal worth €16m plus add-ons with Torino for the transfer of the Italian right-back.

Other than enjoying an impressive season with Torino, Darmian has also established himself in the Italian national team and has earned 11 caps for the Azzurri.

According to , the right-back of an Armenian origin played 46 matches for Torino in Serie A and Europa League this season, scoring twice and assisting one goal.

At Bayern, Darmian could become an alternative to Rafinha, who played as a right-back in the most important matches in Bundesliga and Champions League.

President Serzh Sargsyan today received US Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Ambassador James Warlick.

The interlocutors discussed issues related to the current stage and perspectives of the Karabakh conflict settlement.

President Sargsyan reiterated Armenia’s willingness to continue to work with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to find a solution to the Karabakh conflict through peace talks.

By Harut Sassounian
The California Courier

Armenians worldwide applauded the Cilician Catholicosate for filing a lawsuit in the Turkish Constitutional Court on April 27, demanding the return of its historic seat in Sis, Kozan district of Turkey’s Adana province. The Cilician See’s former headquarters, established in 1293, was confiscated by the Turkish government in 1921, at the culmination of the Armenian Genocide.

Catholicos Aram I announced that should the Turkish court reject the lawsuit, the Catholicosate intends to appeal the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights, which requires that all domestic legal remedies are exhausted before it considers appeals on cases filed against Council of Europe members states. Skeptics of Turkish acceptance of European Court decisions should know that the Republic of Turkey has complied with all rulings since its acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction in 1990.

The Catholicosate’s lawsuit is a landmark case for several reasons:

— It seeks to restore partial justice for the enormous human, material, and territorial losses suffered by Armenians during the Genocide.

— It shifts “Hai Tad [Armenian Cause] efforts beyond the recognition of the Armenian Genocide into the legal sphere,” as stated by Catholicos Aram I.

— It could set a precedent for similar legal claims, as His Holiness informed The New York Times last month: “After 100 years, I thought it was high time that we put the emphasis on reparation…. This is the first legal step. This will be followed by our claim to return all the churches, the monasteries, the church-related properties and, finally, the individual properties.”

Despite the noble objectives pursued by the Catholicosate’s lawsuit, a controversy surfaced in the Armenian community last week, when several websites and newspapers reported that the Catholicosate of Cilicia had demanded that the Turkish government “either return the property of the Catholicosate of Sis or pay a compensation of 100 million Turkish Liras ($37 million).” Garo Armenian, a prominent Armenian community leader, wrote a cautionary article titled, “Our Sacred Sites are not Personal Possessions.” He stressed that “the Catholicosate’s lawsuit raises a series of important questions which must be collectively considered forthwith with prudent diligence in order to prevent any undesirable precedents.” He also urged the Catholicosate to clarify this issue if the news reports have not accurately reflected the content of the lawsuit.

I contacted last week the Catholicosate’s representatives seeking such a clarification. I was assured in an e-mail by Father Housig Mardirossian, Assistant to His Holiness Aram I, that “The lawsuit of the Catholicosate has one clear objective: The return of the Catholicosate of Cilicia.”

In response to my request for a copy of the lawsuit, Payam Akhavan, a prominent international lawyer and lead counsel for the Catholicosate, stated that “it is not possible or advisable at this stage to share the full application while it is still pending before the Turkish Constitutional Court.”

On questions regarding monetary compensation, attorney Akhavan provided the following explanation: “The fundamental claim before the Turkish Constitutional Court is that Turkey should return the Monastery and Cathedral of St. Sofia, both because of the Catholicosate’s property rights, as well as its religious significance for Armenians. The claim is not for compensation, given that this is not merely private property, but rather, property of religious and historical significance. However, I have been advised by our Turkish lawyer that under Turkish laws and procedures it is necessary, with respect to the property rights claim (and not the religious rights claim) to reserve the Catholicosate’s alternate right to seek compensation by providing a provisional amount…. But I want to emphasize that the claim is not for compensation; it is for the return of the property, to be used for religious worship and related cultural purposes.”

I contacted an independent lawyer in Istanbul who confirmed that Turkish law indeed required that a specific value be stated for a property under litigation.

Now that the financial issue is clarified, there are other important matters facing the Catholicosate and Armenians in general. Some of these questions might be a little premature, but Armenians may want to reflect upon them in order to anticipate the consequences of any eventual decisions by Turkish or European courts:

1. What would the Catholicosate do should the Turkish court or government allow the restoration of the Sis church and its use for religious worship without returning ownership of the property to the Catholicosate? Moreover, what if the Turkish government also offered monetary compensation for the repair of the church headquarters while retaining the property rights?

2. In case the Turkish Court or the European Court of Human Rights decided to return the Sis church property, would the Catholicosate relocate to its historic headquarters or continue to remain in exile in Antelias, Lebanon?

In view of the Turkish government’s recent overtures to the heads of Assyrian and Syriac churches to return to their historic headquarters in Turkey from temporary exile in Syria, Turkey’s leaders may use the Armenian lawsuit as a cover vis-à-vis their own hardliners, and make a similar offer to the Catholicosate of Cilicia.

President Erdogan may make such a gesture for three reasons:

1. To preempt a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in favor of the Catholicosate, and avoid setting a legal precedent for future Armenian lawsuits;

2. To score a public relations victory in international circles, particularly after his party’s loss of parliamentary majority in last Sunday’s elections;

3. To reap the economic benefits of foreign tourists and Armenian visitors to the historic headquarters of the Cilician Catholicosate at Sis.

A collection of about 2,000 posters from the World War One era, considered to be one of the world’s finest and amassed over more than a decade by a U.S. Army officer, will be sold at auction later this month, Guernsey’s auction house said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

The collection, which will go under the hammer during an online, unreserved auction with no minimum bids on June 30 and July 1, includes the famous poster of a stern-looking, top-hatted Uncle Sam pointing a finger with the words, “I Want You for U.S. Army.”

Another patriotic poster shows the American flag and laborers with the words “Teamwork Wins,” while a third is of French women working in a laundry inscribed “Four Years in the Fight.”

Although all of the posters, works of art which are expected to fetch between $200 to $5,000 apiece, are patriotic, their topics range from fundraising and food rationing to women’s war efforts, enlistment and animal aid.

About half of the posters are from the United States, while others are in various languages from more than 15 countries such as France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Cuba and China.

The largest poster is a massive 9- by 14-foot American work urging people to “Give, or we Perish,” that was made on behalf of the Armenian Relief Fund.

 

A congregation in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi is being threatened by Muslim criminals who want to seize the church’s land. The menacing group is trying to intimidate the Christian community by saying that they’ll accuse them of the highly punishable offense of blasphemy if they don’t vacate their church property and stop worshiping there, the reports.

Members of the Jerusalem Church, a Pentecostal, 300-family congregation in Karachi, have informed International Christian Concern that they’ve been receiving deadly threats from a group of armed Muslim miscreants, who are known for seizing property from the poor and various targeted killings.

Church members said they were approached in May by the group and were told to leave the church and never return. However, the interaction in May was not the only time that church members were confronted by the group, according to one of the church’s pastors, Ilyas Masih.

“These Muslims have been pressuring the church people not to play musical instruments and asked the church leaders to stop girls from singing with boys in the church,” Masih explained. “Several times they stopped and threatened the worshipers and pastors for going into church for prayers and harassed the women in the past.”

“The Christians of the locality have responded in a brave manner and announced that they will die before they let them grab the church property,” Masih asserted.

John Nazareth Adil, a local activist, told ICC that the group of Muslims probably want to use the church property to carry out “their agendas.”

The congregation has submitted a request to the local police department for extra protection, however, the church is still being threatened, Masih said.

“Yet again a church in Pakistan faces harassment of its women and threats about how and when church services and worship should be conducted,” Wilson Chowdhry, president of the British Pakistani Christian Association, told The Christian Post on Tuesday. ”

“The threats that involve blasphemy are common in Pakistan and Muslims of Pakistan … if any Christian is accused of blasphemy then the whole community has to suffer,” Gill asserted. “Last month, the Muslim mob of about 500 attacked Christians’ homes [in Lahore] on pretexts that one Christian man burned some papers on which Islamic text was written,” Sardar Mushtaq Gill, a leading Pakistani-Christian human rights lawyer said.

Chowdhry explained that most Christians who flee Pakistan do so because of religious persecution and they end up in Malaysia, Sri Lanka or Thailand, and added that each country has a population of about 10,000 Pakistani asylum seekers.

But in most cases, those seeking refugee status in those countries are not recognized as refugees and are often arrested and fined.

“This treatment of [Pakistani] Christians is not unlike the treatment of Armenian Christians, who later faced the awful extermination during the Armenian Genocide as quoted by Lemkin. Just like Turkey before them, Pakistan denies that Christians face brutality, persecution and hatred, and Britain, as a nation, due to vested interests, remains shockingly silent,” Chowdhry contended.

“I hope we do not see a repeat of the mass killings faced by our Armenian brothers and fully understand why Christians in their droves are fleeing Pakistan despite being re-persecuted in other nations such as Thailand, where there is said to be 10,000 Pak-Christian refugees. It is time the world listened to the stories that the victims are desperate for humanitarians to hear.”

During the centenary year of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire, the executive committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) is meeting in this country on 8-13 June 2015, hosted by the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, to honour the martyrs and victims of the genocide. We visit the genocide memorial to remember them and to pray in the name of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. And we celebrate the life of the Armenian nation and the witness of the Armenian church.

The executive committee recalls the Minute on the 100^th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide adopted by the WCC 10^th Assembly in 2013 in Busan. This important action by the 10^th Assembly followed many other occasions on which the WCC Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) had called for recognition of the Armenian genocide by the United Nations (UN) and by member states, dating back to the 1979 session of the UN Human Rights Commission. The WCC has played a key role over many years in accompanying the Armenian church in speaking out and working for recognition of the genocide, and for appropriate responses to the genocide’s continuing impacts on the Armenian people.

A minute adopted at the 6^th Assembly of the WCC held in 1983 in Vancouver acknowledged that “The silence of the world community and deliberate efforts to deny even historical facts have been consistent sources of anguish and growing despair to the Armenian people, the Armenian churches and many others.” While some continue their efforts to deny or minimize these historical events, the executive committee is greatly encouraged by His Holiness Pope Francis’ public recognition on 12 April 2015 of the mass killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians as genocide. We stress that there is a duty on the international community to remember the victims of genocide, in order to heal these historical wounds and to guard against similar atrocities in the future.

The WCC, with its many member churches, has participated in several events marking the centenary, including the official commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and canonization of the martyrs in Yerevan, Armenia, on 21-25 April. The WCC and its member churches will continue to participate in the ongoing centennial commemorations this year by the Armenian diaspora, including with the Armenian Church Holy See of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon, on 18-19 July. The Executive Committee thanks the many member churches and ecumenical partners around the world that have observed or will observe this ongoing centenary in their own contexts, and that have spoken in recognition of the genocide and in commemoration of its victims. Through these commemorations, we acknowledge that these tragic events occurred, and that they must be named by their right name.

 

The Armenian genocide was accompanied in the same historical and political context by genocidal acts against other – mostly Christian – communities of Aramean, Chaldean, Syrian, Assyrian and Greek descent, which have blighted history at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Denial, impunity and the failure to remember such events encourage their repetition. Those who deny or attack the life and dignity of a sister or brother undermine and destroy the humanity of both the victim and themselves. These centennial commemorations should mark the passing of the time when governments remain reluctant to name what occurred one hundred years ago as genocide. We urge all governments to abandon this reluctance.

In this centenary year, we call the international community, the WCC’s member churches and all people of faith and good will to remembrance, and to re-commit to the prevention of genocide and all crimes against humanity.

It’s been a decade since System of a Down released a new album —and all has been quiet on the studio front since the artsy heavy rock quartet came back from a four-year-hiatus in 2010.

But the wait — which is the operative word — may come to an end soon, according to

“We do want to get together after the tour to talk about writing, but who knows?” says drummer John Dolmayan. Right now SOAD’s focus is on the current Wake Up The Souls tour, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide during World War I, “But who knows.” Dolmayan adds. “Maybe things will happen on this tour that will inspire songs. Anything can surprise you.”

For Dolmayan and his mates — all of Armenian heritage — the tour, of course, “transcends the music.”

“This is more important than the next System of a Down album,” he says. “This is something that’s far-reaching, and it’s actually even bigger than the Armenian genocide itself. This is a world issue.”

SOAD has been at the forefront of that issue since forming during 1994 in Los Angeles, and its campaign has carried more weight thanks to the success of five platinum albums, the last two of which — “Mesmerize” and “Hypnotize,” both in 2005 — debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

The spread-out, 14-date tour began during April in Los Angeles and included an April 23 stop in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, the day before the annual worldwide observance of the genocide, which also was SOAD’s first-ever performance in Armenia. For frontman Serj Tankian, it’s not only another opportunity to talk about the genocide and promote worldwide recognition of it but to also tie that in with events going on today.

“What’s important to us is the fact that genocide still occurs today,” Tankian explains. “There is no international, executable agreement, irrespective of the Genocide Convention and many ad hoc committees around the world. There’s nothing that all nations have signed that says when a genocide is occurring, all bets are off. … It’s important to us to not just raise awareness but to help bring justice to this cause.”

But, Dolmayan adds, SOAD is careful about how it delivers that message to crowds coming to hear the group play “Chop Suey!” “Aerials,” “Hypnotize,” “Toxicity” and its other favorites.

“You don’t want to get too preachy,” the drummer acknowledges. “You want to provide information, but you don’t want to push it down people’s throats. So we will have some information available and we have some video presentations we put together that will be taking place during the show.

“We’ve been very fortunate in that we’re in a position we can entertain people and also give them information at the same time, if they’re open to it.”

Militants from the terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) have destroyed a unique Gospel in Iraq.
“They have burned an old Gospel weighing 90 kg in Mosul. A priest had called on them to sell the book, but they did not agree,” Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the Grad Mufti of Syria, who is now in Russia, told .

The mufti said that such a thing as “a religious war” is unacceptable in the world.

“Religion does not reach people’s hearts by the sword,” he said.

Hassoun called on all people of good will to work on “preventing this virus from coming out of Syria and affecting the rest of the world.” He expressed concerns about the fact that attempts are being made to cause religious division in Syria.

Amnesty International has been blocked from entering Azerbaijan before the inaugural European Games, amid a clampdown on free speech designed to quell critics, reports.

The human rights organisation had been planning to launch a new report highlighting the crackdown on free speech, independent media and government critics. However, just as Amnesty officials prepared to travel, they received a message from the Azerbaijan Embassy in London on Tuesday afternoon stating it was “not in a position to welcome the Amnesty mission to Baku at the present time” and suggesting any visit should be postponed until after the games.

The decision to bar Amnesty came as Emma Hughes, a human rights campaigner with Platform who has previously been critical of BP’s role in cooperating with Azerbaijan, was stopped from entering the country. After arriving on Tuesday Hughes, who had been given press accreditation to cover the games, was told she was on a “red list” and held in the terminal before being put on a flight out of Baku.

The European Games, featuring 6,000 athletes begin on Friday in Baku’s new 68,000-capacity national stadium.