DROUGHT STARTED ACROSS ARMENIA
Panorama.am
14:41 19/06/06
Drought started across the regions of Armenia, Zarui Petrosyan,
department head at the Armenian hydremeteorological service told
Panorama.am. In her words, at the moment the level of temperature
of air is above 4-6 degree. There will be no precipitations in the
country until the end of the month with June 22 and 23 the hottest.
The drought was a complete surprise for the ministry of agriculture. In
the words of the department head on relations with the ministry
Vahag Martirosyan drought was not anticipated at the beginning of
the year. Such a disaster covering the republic was reported only 5
years ago. The ministry of agriculture refutes to forecast the damage.

HOT WEATHER AND ITS EFFECTS
Panorama.am
14:53 19/06/06
Forests and green zones continue to burn due to hot weather. Rescue
services report that during the last three days 35 cases of fire were
reported with 14 serious ones.
On June 17 and 18 fire started in grape yards near military policy
on Isakov Avenue in Yerevan, in the forest near Nork-Marash 17
street, biological part, areas close to Malatia Sebastia community
administration office and Erebuni museum and in Dalma parks.
On June 18, at 22.05 fired started near the TV tower in Yerevan. A
rescue team left for the place of emergency followed by two other
fire brigades.

PRESIDENT KOCHARYAN RECEIVED THE OSCE REPRESENTATIVE ON FREEDOM OF THE MEDIA
ArmRadio.am
19.06.2006 16:43
RA President Robert Kocharyan received today the OSCE Representative
on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti.
The President assessed the cooperation with the OSCE in different
directions as effective. Attaching importance to the freedom of media,
he said that free press has its decisive mission in carrying out public
control and presenting the real situation in the country. At the same
time, according to Robert Kocharyan, the freedom of press should be
regulated so that the rights of the individual are strictly respected.
The interlocutors exchanged opinions about formation of the free
press, the press as a major obstacle for development of business and
the necessity of state media. In the President’s words, Armenia is
still in a transition period, and in many cases the peculiarities of
this period are characteristic of the country.

GEORGIAN MINISTER INVITES ARMENIANS TO AJARIA
Panorama.am
15:03 19/06/06
Today Armenian-Georgian friendship train will leave for Batumi from
Yerevan for the first time. The opening of the rout was officially
celebrated on June 17. Georgian economic development minister Irakili
Chogovadze thanked the routers for completing their job in short
time. “Armenians will have cheap and comfortable opportunity to come
to Ajaria,” he said.
According to Georgian minister, 20 000 tourists went to Georgia last
year and this year the number is going to rise to 50 000.

GEORGIAN EXPERIENCE INTERESTED VARTAN KHACHATRYAN
Panorama.am
15:29 19/06/06
Armenian finance minister Vartan Khachatryan said in a press
conference they are interested in Georgian experience of collecting
taxes. According to Georgian forecasts, taxes will make up 20% of
Georgian GDP whereas in Armenia the rate is very low. Last year taxes
made up only 14.3% of the Armenian GDP.
“Increase in tax revenues are a major problem for the government,”
Khachatryan said adding that GDP growth is big in the country whereas
taxe revenues stay behind.

HUNGARY TO DEDICATE MEMORIAL TO ETHNIC GERMANS EXPELLED AFTER WORLD WAR II
AP Worldstream
Jun 18, 2006
Hungary on Sunday will dedicate a memorial to the thousands of ethnic
Germans who were expelled from the country after World War II.
The mass expulsion from Hungary of those considered to be Germans
began on Jan. 19, 1946, in the small town of Budaors on the western
outskirts of Budapest, the capital.
President Laszlo Solyom, Parliament Speaker Katalin Szili, and Ursula
Seiler-Albring, Germany’s ambassador to Hungary, are expected to
speak at the ceremony in Budaors’s Old Cemetery.
In just six weeks, some 7,000 people _ around 90 percent of the
population of the town known in German as Wundersch _ were forced
out of Hungary and deported to Germany.
“Without judgment on merits, almost all of the town’s population
was branded on the basis of the principle of collective guilt,” the
town said in a pamphlet commemorating the expulsions. “All those
who considered themselves ethnic Germans or whose mother language
was German according to the 1941 census were among the guilty, among
those expelled.”
In all, some 200,000 ethnic Germans were driven from Hungary until
1948.
Similar measures were also undertaken in the former Czechoslovakia,
where some 3 million ethnic Germans and 600,000 ethnic Hungarians
were expelled after the war under the decrees of former Czechoslovak
President Edvard Benes because many had supported Adolf Hitler and
the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe.
Today, ethnic Germans are one of 13 national or ethnic minorities
recognized in Hungary, also including Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks,
Roma (Gypsies) and Serbs.
An exhibition on the expulsion of the German population from Hungary
opened June 1, at the House of Terror in Budapest.

RUSSIA SAYS CHECHEN REBEL LEADER SLAIN AFTER ASSOCIATE TIPS OFF POLICE
Kazbek Vakhayev
AP Worldstream
Jun 18, 2006
Police killed the Chechen rebel leader acting on a tip from within
his network, a possible blow to efforts to spread the increasingly
Islam-inspired insurgency throughout southern Russia.
Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot Saturday during a raid on a hideout
in his Chechen hometown of Argun, nine miles east of Grozny. He had
been planning a terror attack in Argun to coincide with the Group of
Eight summit of leading industrialized nations in St. Petersburg in
mid-July, the Moscow-backed Chechen premier said.
Wearing combat fatigues, Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov posed for TV
cameras next to a half-naked bloodied body identified as the rebel
leader’s. He said a close associate of Sadulayev’s tipped police to
his whereabouts for the equivalent of US$55 (A43).
“He urgently needed to buy a dose of heroin, so he sold his leader
for heroin,” Kadyrov, flanked by his lieutenants, said with a grin.
The prime minister said his paramilitary police had wanted to capture
Sadulayev but had to kill him when he resisted arrest. Russian
television stations showed the basement of a house where the rebel
leader was allegedly hiding, its wall riddled with bullets.
“The terrorists have been virtually beheaded. They have sustained a
severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it,” Kadyrov
said. “We must decisively end international terrorism in the whole
of the North Caucasus.”
The mountainous Caucasus region encompasses southern Russia _ including
the breakaway Chechen republic _ and the former Soviet republics of
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
An intelligence agent and a police officer were killed in the
operation, the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency,
said in a statement. One rebel also was killed and two rebels escaped,
NTV news reported.
Top rebel aide Ibrahim Mezhidov confirmed Sadulayev was killed,
according to the Kavkaz Center Web site sympathetic to the rebels.
Speaking to Ekho Moskvy radio, rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who lives
in London, denounced the killing as a “political murder.” He said
warlord Doku Umarov would now become secessionist president.
An Islamic scholar, Sadulayev took over after Russian forces killed
rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005. Maskhadov had called
Sadulayev a co-organizer of one of the most high-profile Chechen
rebel attacks: a 2004 raid on police and security installations in
the neighboring republic of Ingushetia that killed some 90 people.
Russian prosecutors consider Sadulayev the top organizer of the 2001
kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck, of New York, who worked for Doctors
Without Borders in southern Russia. Gluck was freed after 25 days.
Previously, Sadulayev had been an imam of his hometown mosque. He
preached on local television when Chechnya enjoyed de-facto
independence after the Russian troops’ withdrawal following the
botched 1994-96 Chechen campaign.
Though rooted in nationalist sentiment, Chechnya’s separatist movement
took on a growing Islamic cast after Russian forces launched a second
Chechen invasion in 1999. In 2002, Sadulayev was named the chief
judge of the Chechen rebels’ court of Islamic law.
As rebel president, Sadulayev presided over insurgent efforts to
reach beyond Chechen borders and encourage militant movements in
nearby Caucasus regions.
Militant cells linked to Chechen rebels have spread quickly across
the volatile Caucasus provinces, encouraged by the region’s poverty
and simmering public anger at police brutality and persecution of
Muslims who worship outside officially sanctioned mosques.
“Sadulayev has cast himself as the leader of the so called ‘Caucasus
Front,’ the man leading a new generation of young militants,” Alexei
Malashenko, and expert with the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office,
told The Associated Press.
He also was a compromise figure, accepted by different militant cells
throughout the Caucasus, and as a result his death deals a serious
blow to the Chechen rebel movement, said Alexander Ignatenko, head
of the Moscow-based Institute for Religion and Politics.
“Heads of regional cells have sworn an oath of allegiance to him,”
Ignatenko told AP. “They might not accept another Chechen as their
leader.”‘
Some analysts said that Sadulayev’s death could set stage for a turf
battle between warlords Umarov and Shamil Basayev.
A top rebel commander, Basayev has claimed responsibility for some
of Russia’s worst terror attacks, including the seizure of some 800
hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 and the September 2004
school hostage taking in Beslan that killed 331.
“Basayev is much more authoritative than Umarov,” Malashenko said.
The Chechen prime minister _ whose feared paramilitary forces are
suspected of abducting civilians and other violence _ vowed Saturday
to track down both warlords.
Political commentator Yulia Latynina said the rebel leader’s killing
marked the beginning of Kadyrov’s bid for regional presidency. “By
liquidating a major rebel figure … Kadyrov wanted to prove his
loyalty to federal authorities,” she said on Ekho Moskvy.
Kadyrov is the son of Chechnya’s first pro-Moscow president, Akhmad
Kadyrov, who was assassinated in a rebel bombing in 2004. He has
moved up steadily within the region’s Kremlin-backed government and
is expected to become Chechen president when he reaches the mandated
age of 30 in October.

OPENING OF THE 2ND FLOOR OF THE KALAYDJIAN REST HOME
;pID=5 9&cID=4&s=2
17-06-2006
The President of the Republic Tassos Papadopoulos, on Wednesday 28
June, at 7:00 pm. will open the newly constructed second floor of
the Kalaydjian Rest Home.
Open cocktail reception to follow.
The Kalaydjian Foundation is a non-profit benevolent organization
set up in 1984 with the purpose of helping disadvantaged and needy
members of society, with a major focus being on the Armenian community
in Cyprus.
According to its founding charter, the Foundation aims to set up
and maintain a rest home for the elderly, grant scholarships to
gifted students for higher education in Cyprus or abroad, give
financial assistance to people in urgent need of medical treatment
abroad, provide aid to disadvantaged members of society in Cyprus,
provide funding for the restoration of buildings and monuments of
traditional character and/or architecture, and to promote and sponsor
the development of culture and the arts in Cyprus.
One of the Kalaydjian Foundation’s main roles at present is the
running of the Kalaydjian Rest Home for the Elderly, which it opened
in March 1988 in Nicosia, Cyprus. The Kalaydjian Rest Home was built
by the brothers Bedros and Aram Kalaydjian in memory of their parents
and originally comprised 12 rooms, but following a major renovation
and extension in 2005, it now boasts 22 rooms with capacity for
a total of 40 people. Its facilities include two large sitting
rooms with libraries and satellite television, two dining rooms,
and air-conditioning, television and private bathrooms in every room.
Furthermore, a small chapel was added next to the home in 1996 to
address its residents’ spiritual needs.

EXHIBITION OF ARMENIAN ICONS
;pID=5 8&cID=4&s=2
16-06-2006
His Eminence Archbishop Varoujan & The Armenian Prelacy of Cyprus
Present An Exhibition of 33 Armenian Icons By Iconographer Rev.
Hovsep Ashkarian dedicated to the 25th Anniversary of the Armenian
Cathedral of Sourp Asdvadzadzin in Nicosia
The Exhibition will be opened By the Rev. Archimandrite Isaias Kykkotis
Representing the Bishop of Kykko
VENUE:- “Utidjian” Hall of the Armenian Prelacy
OPENING:- Sunday, 18th June 2006 At 12:00 noon
LAST DAY:- Friday, 24th June 2006
OPEN HOURS:- Daily between 09:00-13:00 and 20:00-22:00.

LOOKING FOR GUARANTEES
Aram Abrahamian
Aravot.am
16 June 06
EU and NATO aren’t Siamese twins; we can aspire to the EU but not
to the NATO. It’s another thing that the first organization doesn’t
need in either Armenia or any other former soviet country. But the
second is ready to involve us theoretically but agreeing with at this
moment will mean to find ourselves in strongest economic jeopardy of
Russia /depriving of gas, wheat, nuclear fuel etc./ and jeopardizing
Karabakh as well. If the RA President declares tomorrow that we have
a project for NATO membership, Russia will take revenge on us and
will encourage Azerbaijan’s attack on Karabakh in moral and military
cases. At this moment, it seems there is no guarantee that the West
will give us enough resources for counteracting those two economic
and military dangers.
I think, our aim must be the creation of those guarantees without
strict declarations in Sahakashvili style. Unfortunately our authority
goes just on the opposite way more deepening our dependence to
Russia. Selling the important branches of economy to Russia solves
our internal political problems and not our security, or rather the
problem of keeping the authority. For example selling the sphere of
communication to the Russian operator isn’t an obliged condition for
keeping the security of Armenia.
And our officials are constantly explaining the Western officials
in the outside sphere why we like Russians so much. The Na deputy
chairman Vahan Hovhannisian explained the NATO PA in Yerevan on
14 of June that the collective security agreement led by the RF
“has anti -terrorist character and provides for internal security
but anyway NATO membership means for Armenia to review relations
with that organization, for which Armenia isn’t ready today.” The
Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian said to “Azatutiun” b/s after
progress sitting of the NATO Council in the same day in Brussels;
“It became clear during discussions that everybody positively marked
our complementary policy and steps which we realize in security
problems”. It means the West treats with comprehension the fact of
being the “outpost” for Russia.
And it is the truth. Nobody makes us integrate to Europe. We, our
people need in it. But the guarantee for “getting rid of ” Russia
is the NK conflict settlement and democracy. But our authorities
don’t need in it.