Category: News

After years of controversy, Austria’s parliament has passed a law allowing it to seize the house where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, the BBC reports.

Owner Gerlinde Pommer had repeatedly refused to sell the building in Braunau am Inn or allow renovations.

Mrs Pommer will now be given compensation. But it is still not clear what the government will do with the former guesthouse.

The authorities are keen to stop it becoming a draw for neo-Nazis.

The parliament’s decision puts an end to a long-running row between the government and Mrs Pommer, who is now retired.

For many years, the government paid Mrs Pommer a generous rent in an attempt to prevent the three-storey building being used as a site for neo-Nazi tourism.

In the past it was used by a local charity as a day centre and workshop for people with special needs.

But the charity was forced to move out several years ago when Mrs Pommer blocked renovations.

The building’s future has been widely debated, with opinion torn between razing it or changing its use.

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

 

Engineers and employees from major tech companies — including Google, IBM, Slack, and Stripe — have pledged never to build a database of people based on their religious beliefs.

A group of employees at major tech companies have signed  refusing to help build a Muslim registry. The pledge states that signatories will advocate within their companies to minimize collection and retention of data that could enable ethnic or religious targeting under the Trump administration, to fight any unethical or illegal misuse of data, and to resign from their positions rather than comply.

The group describes themselves as “engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people.”

“We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable,” the pledge reads.

“We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes,” the signatories said.

Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) lodged a complaint at an Istanbul prosecutor’s office, accusing Kurtulmus of breaching the universal human rights declaration to which Ankara is a party, as well as the Turkish penal code, AFP reports. 

The use by a senior Turkish official of a pejorative word meaning “infidel,” widely used in Ottoman times to describe non-Muslims, has sparked accusations of hate speech and fears of discrimination against minorities.

In a speech earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus used the word “gavur” (“infidel”), prompting an outcry from Turkey’s Armenian minority.

Kurtulmus on December 3 boasted of “new Turkey” being shaped under the wings of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) which he said stood against imperialism or exploitation.

“We need to take the issue of independence seriously. To us, independence is to stand tall and call an infidel ‘an infidel’,” he told a meeting in the northern Turkish city of Kastamonu.

Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) lodged a complaint at an Istanbul prosecutor’s office, accusing Kurtulmus of breaching the universal human rights declaration to which Ankara is a party, as well as the Turkish penal code.

Ahmet Hakan, a columnist in the Hurriyet newspaper, wrote that Kurtulmus’s comments constituted “hate crime.”

“Even the Ottoman (empire) that you like so much banned the use of expressions like ‘infidel’ in order to put an end to discrimination against non-Muslim citizens,” he said, referring to the government.

In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire banned the use by officials or private persons of inflammatory epithets based on religion, language or race, as part of a series of reforms heavily influenced by European ideas.

Garo Paylan, Istanbul MP of Armenian origin from the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said Kurtulmus’ comments were hate speech that required an apology.

“He should have apologised,” he told AFP. “I am an MP who was chased and stoned in his childhood and was labelled an infidel.”

Kurtulmus later clarified his comments, saying they were “not meant to offend our non Muslim citizens” but to take a firm stand against imperialism, in a statement to the official news agency Anadolu.

He also made a personal call to Hakan, saying: “There’s an epithet in my wife’s hometown that says “infidel haji’. Even a man who went to hajj (Muslim pilgrimage) is called infidel. Why? Because he is a tyrant.”

Paylan said the term “infidel” was a “contaminated word” and added: “When you ask people on the street who an infidel is, at least 50 percent would say he’s an Armenian.”

The word Brexit has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the BBC reports.

It defines Brexit as “the (proposed) withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and the political process associated with it”.

It continues: “Sometimes used specifically with reference to the referendum held in the UK on 23rd June 2016, in which a majority of voters favoured withdrawal from the EU.”

The OED’s senior editor said it became widely used with “impressive” speed.

Craig Leyland said economists started using the word in May 2012, influenced by “Grexit”, which has also been added to the OED, and was used to describe the potential withdrawal of Greece from the Eurozone monetary union.

 – The office of the Armenian National Committee of South Americalaunched a campaign celebrating the ten years of the Argentine National Law 26.199 that officially recognizes the Armenian Genocide in the country.

The bill was supported by the Armenian National Committee of Buenos Aires and was passed by the Chamber of Deputies on November 29, 2006, and by the Senate on December 13, 2006.

Armenian Deputy FM has lashed out at his Azeri counterpart for attempts to politicize the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization.

Addressing the 35^th meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of BSEC member states, Armenian Deputy FM Ashot Hovakimyan said “the attempts to politicize the organization are unacceptable.”

He noted that “BSEC is not the platform where one can try to raise issues in no way related to the mandate of the organization and.”

During the meeting in Belgrade the Council summed up the six months of the Serbian presidency.

Ashot Hovakimyan noted in his speech that “over the past six months Armenia has kept making efforts to promote multifaceted economic cooperation, implement the programs on the agenda of the organization, encourage investments.”

Photo: AP Photo/ Petros Giannakouris

Greek Foreign Ministry’s Secretary General for International Economic Relations Giorgos Tsipras held a meeting in Moscow with the delegation of the Eurasian Economic Commission and discussed the prospects of further cooperation between Athens and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), the Greek Foreign Ministry said, Sputnik reports.

According to the ministry, the sides discussed the development of trade and economic relations between Greece and all EAEU member states and the upcoming visit of Tigran Sargsyan, the chairman of the board of the Eurasian Economic Commission to Athens.

“The sides put an emphasis on the conference scheduled to take place in Thessaloniki on December 15 and organized by the Hellenic-Russian Chamber of Commerce, during which the Eurasian Economic Commission members will present tasks and goals of the EEU, as well as business opportunities and prospects for Greece and the EEU members,” the ministry said on Tuesday.

According to the statement, Tsipras also held a meeting with Russian Deputy Minister of Economic Development Alexander Tsybulskiy. The sides discussed some issues of the bilateral economic relations.

 

 

 

The village of Talish in Artsakh’s Martakert region was one of the hot spots of the April war. The population here counted 500, but only a dozen live here today and try to restore the native village.

Nine months after the military actions unleashed by Azerbaijan the traces of war are still fresh in Talish, but for two weeks now the silence here has been interrupted by the noise of construction works, not the shots of the rival.

Head of Talish village Vilen Petrosyan says the resettlement process will start after the winter. It has been decided not to recover the districts targeted by the Azeri forces. A new school will be built in the center of the village.

There are currently 12 men living in Talish. They say their families will return from neighboring Alashan after the reconstruction works are completed.

“There is no need to persuade the residents to return to the village,” Vilen Petrosyan says. According to him, favorable conditions will be created for all families willing to return.”

Shots from the Azerbaijani side could be heard all through the conversation with Vilen Petrosyan. “It’s a common thing,” he says and adds that “the shooting has always been there, but I don’t think it has frightened or dissapoiunted anyone here.”

According to Vilen Khachatryan “the priority now is to return the village to its former glory.”

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

 

The planned evacuation of rebel fighters and civilians from devastated eastern Aleppo has been delayed, the BBC reports.

Government buses have been brought in but none have left yet, reports say.

The Syrian government is said to be demanding the simultaneous evacuation of its own injured fighters and civilians from nearby towns that are encircled by opposition forces.

A ceasefire between government troops and the rebels was declared in Aleppo on Tuesday.

Eastern Aleppo has been held by the rebels since 2012. But the rebels had been squeezed into ever smaller areas of the city in recent months by a major government offensive, backed by Russian air power.

A priceless collection of gold artifacts from Crimea that was on loan to a Dutch museum when the Peninsula reunited with Russia must be returned to Ukraine and not Crimea, a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday in a judgment.

Kiev and the four museums have been wrangling over the fate of the archeological treasures, including gems, helmets and scabbards, which were on loan to Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum in March, 2014.

Four museums in Crimea asked for the collection to be returned, but Ukraine argued that it was state property.

The court decided that under UNESCO rules the treasures should be handed back to the sovereign state.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted: “This is an important victory for Ukraine.”

The ruling by a Dutch court to give Scythian gold to Ukraine violates international law and the principles of inter-museum exchanges, the items should be returned to Crimea where they had been discovered and kept for decades, the Russian Culture Ministry said in response.

“Unfortunately, the decision is an example of violation of the rights of cultural institutions and destruction of the unity of museum collections. It contradicts not only the provisions of the contracts, but also grossly violates the principles of international inter-museum exchanges and the right of the Crimean people to access their own cultural heritage,” the Russian ministry said.