Category: News

Former Miss Turkey and model Merve Büyüksaraç has been sentenced to prison for “insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his prime ministry via a post on Instagram. A complaint was filed against Büyüksaraç, who was chosen Miss Turkey in 2006, for “openly insulting a public official for his duty,” the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

“The boundaries of criticism shouldn’t be interpreted harshly due to the complainant being a state authority. We think that the statements my client shared should be evaluated politically. That’s why we demand the acquittal of my client,” said Ali Deniz Ceylan, Büyüksaraç’s lawyer, on May 31.

The prison sentence of one year, two months and 17 days was postponed. Up to four years and five months in prison was sought for Büyüksaraç.

The lawyers of the parties were the only participants in the hearing, in which Erdoğan’s lawyer claimed that Büyüksaraç’s statements could not be evaluated within the framework of criticism.

“An attack took place against the personal rights of my client. We want the defendant to be punished,” said Erdoğan’s lawyer, Hatice Özay.

Büyüksaraç had said that she was regretful in her defense in the first hearing of the case and asked for her acquittal.

“The poem I’ve shared was shared 960,000 times on social media. I shared the poem via giving quotes from it. The comments near the pictures and the poems, which are in the bill of indictment, don’t belong to me,” Büyüksaraç said.

“I’m regretful that the post I shared was perceived as an insult,” she also said.

Borussia Dortmund midfielder Marco Reus was dropped from Germany’s European Championship squad on Tuesday, and captain Bastian Schweinsteiger made the final cut despite injury, the Associated Press reports.

Reus, who had been struggling at the team’s training camp in Ascona, Switzerland, was omitted from the final list of 23 players, along with Hoffenheim defender Sebastian Rudy and Bayer Leverkusen players Julian Brandt and Karim Bellarabi.

“The doctors could not give a clear prognosis,” Germany coach Joachim Loew said of Reus. “He has huge health problems and can only walk straight at the moment. More wasn’t possible in training so far.”

Loew said there were too many doubts over whether Reus could recover in time for the tournament in France.

“It’s a bitter decision for us and for him, a disappointment for us all, because a Marco Reus in form, healthy and fit, would have been a huge addition,” Loew said. “But for technical reasons we have to take this decision as we know this tournament will be very strenuous.”

Reus also missed Germany’s World Cup win in 2014 because of injury in a friendly match against Armenia.

In 2016 on May 30^th in the framework of World Stamp Show NY-2016  a stamped souvenir sheet  dedicated to the  “Sport. 31^st Summer Olympic Games “Rio-2016″” was canceled and put into circulation.

The souvenir sheet depicts the panoramic view of Rio de Janeiro. The stamp of the s/sheet depicts the famous Copacabana beach of Rio de Janeiro, with the images of some of the sports which Armenia will present during 31^st Summer Olympic Games..

The official cancellation ceremony was carried out by Armenia’s permanent representative to the United Nations  Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and the Managing Director of “HayPost Trust Management”   Juan Pablo Gechidjian.

HayPost is taking part in the biggest international philatelic exhibition: World Stamp Show – NY 2016

World Stamp Show -NY 2016 is a major once-a-decade eight day international philatelic exhibition which will take place May 28 through June 4 in New York, USA.

More than 120 philatelic associations and organizations and over 50 national postal operators from all over the world are taking part in the event. HayPost participates at such a major exhibition for the first time and presents Armenian philately in a strategically situated boot, thus bringing recognition to Armenia and Armenian philately. At the event Armenian stamp issuances from 2013 -2016 are presented.

Teams from 12 unrecognized states have come together for  the CONIFA World Cup in Abkhazian capital Sukhum.

The Western Armenian team beat the Chagos Islands 12:0 in the first group stage match held in the “Dinamo stadium” of Sukhum.

The final match will be played the following Sunday, the 05.06.2016.

The following 12 teams play the World Football Cup #Abkhazia2016 to determine the World Champion outside FIFA: Abkhazia, Chagos Islands, Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus, Padania, Panjab, Raetia, Sapmi, Somaliland, Székely Land, United Koreans in Japan and Western Armenia.

The Football Federation of Western Armenia (FFWA) was established in 2015.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan is set to reject Borussia Dortmund’s offer of a contract extension, with agent Mino Raiola saying in : “Why should we prolong it now?”

Dortmund have been trying to tie Mkhitaryan to a new deal since the turn of the year but, going into the summer break, the 27-year-old has yet to put pen to paper and is about to enter the final 12 months of his current Borussia contract.

However, German tabloid Bild said on Tuesday that the Armenia international is set to reject club’s latest offer, and Raiola told the paper: “Why should we prolong it now? ‘Micki’ is under contract until 2017, and we continue to think about his future.”

Raiola, who also represents the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku, reportedly wanted to include a release clause in Mkhitaryan’s contract that would allow the midfielder to switch clubs should current BVB coach Thomas Tuchel leave the Westfalenstadion in the future, according to ESPN.

However, Dortmund have said in the past they will no longer allow players to insert release clauses into their contracts.

“I won’t comment on this,” Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke told Bild when asked about the breakdown in negotiations.

Mkhitaryan, the club’s record signing when he joined from Shaktar Donetsk for €27.5 million in 2013, has excelled under Tuchel and was by his Bundesliga colleagues in the prestigious annual kicker player poll.

Bild also reports that Chelsea and Arsenal are interested in signing the skillful midfielder, but it’s unlikely that Dortmund are prepared to sell considering the club have already sold Mats Hummels to Bayern Munich and İlkay Gündoğan could also be set to move on.

Shortly before the planned vote on the Armenian Genocide resolution at the German Bundestag, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a phone conversation with Turkey’s new Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, Spiegel reports.

The PM called the resolution a “baseless and unjust political judgment.” He said “Turkey and millions of Turks in Germany” are watching the developments with concern.

The Turkish PM said “Ankara expects a “respectful attitude” from the Federal Government and the Bundestag.

The Bundestag is set to vote on the bill on June 2.

The trial of Argentina and Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi on tax fraud charges is due to start in Spain, the BBC reports.

Messi and his father Jorge, who manages his financial affairs, are accused of defrauding Spain of more than €4m between 2007 and 2009.

The authorities allege that the two used tax havens in Belize and Uruguay to conceal earnings from image rights.

The Spanish tax agency is demanding heavy fines and prison sentences. They deny any wrongdoing.

The trial is expected to last for three days, with Messi appearing in court on Thursday.

The Public Services Regulatory Commission ruled today to cut the gas price. Those consumers, who use up to 10 thousand cubic meters of gas monthly, will now pay AMD 146,700 including VAT (down from  AMD 156.000).

For those with a monthly consumption of 10 thousand cubic meters or more, the current price will be calculated under the formula of P = 257.56 * E, where P is the cost of natural gas for consumers of 10 thousand cubic meters of gas or more, and E is the average exchange rate of AMD against USD 1 as of the 25^th of the previous month.

The changes come into force from July 1.

From his grandmother beginning at an early age, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Balakian heard occasional hints of a darker family history set in Armenia. And he began to explore a past that remains fought over to this day, the expulsion and killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. Many members of Balakian’s family died. Others, like his grandmother and aunts, survived after a horrific flight on foot.

Balakian would write about these events in history titled “The Burning Tigris” and in a family memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.”

“One of the reasons for my writing “Black Dog of Fate” was to try to make sense of growing up in a family in which a traumatic history was really repressed. It wasn’t spoken about. It was silenced. And yet the leakages that I experienced as a kid growing up in affluent suburbia were beguiling and weird and strange, and they stayed with me,” Peter Balakian said in an interview with

“I began writing poems with a kind of passion, and I never stopped. I was working my way as a young guy in his 20s writing lyric poems. And around the mid to late 1970s, for various reasons, the news of history started percolating in me,” Balakian said.

“And I started understanding more of the big picture of my own family’s historical experience as genocide survivors. The poem in its unique form, its form of compressed language and particular kinds of probe images, I like to call them, or incisive, compressed image language, is capable of going to history and its aftermath in ways that no other literary form can,” the poet added.

“Who drowned waiting in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There, the sky is cochineal. There, the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There, the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes.”

Many Armenians, including Balakian’s grandmother, fled into what is today Syria. Most were killed or starved to death along the way. In 2009, just before the civil war began, Balakian joined a “60 Minutes” crew in Syria for a report on their fate.

“It was extraordinary then to be there. Looking back at it now, I feel like it’s a dream. But for me, it was also exciting to be there, because there’s a very rich Armenian culture and community in Aleppo and a gorgeous church. And so all that was a kind of connecting with a diasporan culture,” Peter Balakian said.

“And then when the war started, when the war began to just destroy all of this, I would look on, on the screens and on the TV images and the computer images with pain and disbelief that, just in the little case of Armenian cultural life there, churches that were hundreds of years old were gone. Whole communities were disbanded. And if that was true just for the smaller Armenian population of Syria, we all knew what was happening to the broad Syrian population,” he added.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday expressed concerns to German Chancellor Angela Merkel over plans in Germany’s parliament to recognize the World War I killings of Armenians as genocide, the Associated Press reports.

Germany’s parliament will hold a vote on a motion describing the deaths as genocide on Thursday.

Erdogan’s office said the Turkish leader told Merkel during a telephone conversation that it was “important that a prudent approach is displayed.” His office said Erdogan had initiated the call.

Before departing for a trip to Uganda and Kenya, Erdogan noted that Germany is home to a large population of ethnic Turks and suggested that ties between the two NATO allies could suffer.

“This situation would of course damage the diplomatic, economic, commercial, political and military … relations between the two countries,” Erdogan told reporters. “I believe that this will be thought through.”

The Turkish leader added that any decision taken by the German parliament would not “have any aspect that would be binding under international law.”

In Berlin, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Turks in Germany were unlikely to change their view of Germany because of the resolution.

“The fact that an event happened 100 years ago isn’t an obstacle to Parliament dealing with it,” Steinmeier told reporters.

“What’s still urgently necessary is a reappraisal of this event from different perspectives, which is certainly not going to be easy and would likely be controversial, by the two neighboring countries,” he said, in reference to Turkey and Armenia.