JIM TOROSIAN AND GEGHAM GRIGORIAN AWARDED WITH MEDALS
By Melania Badalian
AZG Armenian Daily
27/04/2006
The Press Service of Holy Etchmiadzin informed that Karekin II,
Catholicos of All Armenians, awarded outstanding Armenian architect
Jim Torosian and Gegham Grigorian, art director of the Yerevan State
Opera and Ballet Theatre, with St. Sahak and St. Mersop medals for
their service and contribution to the Armenian culture.
In the opening speech of the award ceremony, T. Nerses Archbishop
Pozapalian touched upon the creative life and achievements of these
two prominent figures of the Armenian culture. At the same time,
he highly estimated the attention of Catholicos Karekin II to the
Armenian culture.
Professor Varazdat Harutyunian and poet Seyran Zakarian also highly
estimated the creative achievements of Jim Torosian and Gegham
Grigorian.
The relevant decrees of Karekin II were read by T. Arshak Archbishop
Khachatrian and T. Paren Archbishop Avetikian. Jim Torosian and
Gegham Grigorian expressed their deep gratitude to Karekin II for
the award. The Supreme Patriarch’s speech closed the award ceremony.

FILM DIRECTOR MIKAEL DOVLATIAN FEELS BETTER
By Nana Petrosian
AZG Armenian Daily
27/04/2006
Film director Mikael Dovlatian, secretary of RA Union of
Cinematographers, feels better. It’s noteworthy that he was attacked
on Monday evening, in Moscow. A group of unknown young men attacked
Dovlatian in front of Akademicheskaya hotel, where he was staying.
Mr. Dovlatian was participating in the annual Forum of Cinematographers
currently held in Moscow. The leadership of the forum and its
participants expressed their indignation and concern to the
administration of Moscow in a letter of protest. “We are stating
that such incidents can become destructive for the development of
humanitarian cooperation,” the letter stretched. The chairmen of
the cinematographers’ unions from Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine signed the letter.
Ruben Gevorgiants, chairman of the RA Union of Cinematographers,
stated that the incident aroused the indignation of the Armenian
cinematographers. “That was a disgraceful incident that may happen
in Moscow to everyone each five seconds,” Gevorgiants said.

CORN STILL RESISTS
A1+
[06:27 pm] 26 April, 2006
The fall of temperature for the last few days will leave its negative
impact on fruit orchards and especially those trees which had already
budded.
Movses Manoukyan, the head of the Shirak region agriculture and
ecology administration informed about it.
According to the specialists, the changes in the weather will not
affect corn. It is noteworthy that in the Shirak region 19 thousand
hectares of wheat has been sown.
TV Company “Tsayg” of Gyumri

ARMENIA REPRESENTED ITS PROBLEMS
A1+
[07:26 pm] 26 April, 2006
Today the 14th meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Black Sea
Economic Cooperation in Bucharest which marked the end of the
presidency of Romania.
As a result of the meeting of the Foreign Ministers the Bucharest
declaration was adopted where the participants made decisions about
the necessity of organizational reforms in order to raise the efficient
of BSEC.
In his speech RA deputy Foreign Minister A. Kirakosyan stressed
that the disagreements between the BSEC member countries must be
eliminated in order to secure cooperation within the framework of
the structure. He called on all the member countries to reconsider
their approaches towards the substructures of the region mentioning
the economic expediency of its re-exploitation.
During the meeting Leonidas Chrisantopulos, the first Greek Ambassador
extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Armenia was elected Secretary
General of the BSCE international Secretariat.
Since May 1 the Russian Federation will take up the presidency of BSEC.
From: Baghdasarian

FALSE MEDICINE IN THE GYUMRI HOSPITAL
A1+
[07:48 pm] 26 April, 2006
False medicine has been found in the Republic of Armenia. The
laboratory investigation of the Medicine and Medical Technologies
Experimental Center revealed that the ampoules which were supposed
to contain “Zefuroxin” contained “Ampiciline” instead.
By now the Gyumri hospital is the only place where the medicine
has been found. According to Satenik Beybutyan, head of the health
administration of the Shirak region, they are already aware of the
incident.
Medicine is allotted to the Shirak region by the Ministry of Health
but separate medical institutions have the right to buy medicine from
private organizations too.
TV Company “Tsayg” of Shirak

THE FIRST OMBUDSMAN MADE A NON-OFFICIAL REPORT
A1+
[08:55 pm] 26 April, 2006
Human rights are violated systematically in Armenia and the defense of
human rights is not perceived in itself especially by the RA highest
authorities. This was the announcements of the first Ombudsman of
Armenia, Larissa Alaverdyan. She said that by the decree of Robert
Kocharyan since January 4 the country did not have an Ombudsman for 40
days, while according to the Constitution each citizen has the right
to protect his rights. “My work for the last two years showed that
everyone accepts and respects human rights but when it comes to acting,
the authorities mainly treat it as something declared and not real.”
Larissa Alaverdyan stressed that human rights are usually violated in
the higher authorities. She noted that very often people who want to
protect their rights are simply beaten up. Noting that human rights
are violated in all the countries, Mrs. Alaverdyan said that in some
countries those violating human rights are punished and in others
they are not.
She informed that they have cooperated with several state structures
and the cooperation has had positive results in the lower and middle
rings of the authorities more often than in the higher and highest
ones.
According to Mrs. Alaverdyan, only 25% of all the Armenians live
in Armenia, and the rest live in other countries as national
minorities. So Armenia must protect the rights of the national
minorities. And as there are many refugees in Armenia, We must
protect the rights of refugees, families of soldiers and those who
were disabled after the war.
According to Mrs. Alaverdyan the authorities which cannot protect
the rights of theses weak groups are weak themselves. She brought
many examples when the rights of these very groups are violated by the
authorities. She reminded the cases when refuges were deprived of their
houses or the lands of perished soldiers were given to high officials.
By the way, Larissa Alaverdyan brought another fact: Minister of
Transport and Communication Andranik Manoukyan took away the mill of
an LTD. The court decided to return the property to its owner but
the court workers and the Ombudsman’s office were unable to carry
out the court decision.
By the way, Mrs. Alaverdyan noted that in this case when there is no
political will no protect human rights the will of the society will
get stronger.

“THE APRIL INCIDENTS WERE PLANNED BEFOREHAND”
Karine Asatryan
A1+
[04:42 pm] 12 April, 2006
This day two years ago, until midnight, it never occurred to anyone
that the authorities would order to raise batons on the peaceful
demonstrators whose only demand was to establish justice in the
country. The violations on the night of April 13 came to testify
that the authorities of the third Republic of Armenia are able to do
anything. According to NA deputy Hmayak Hovhannisyan, the incidents
of April 2004 were planned.
– The opposition was isolated from the process of governing the country
by a coalition memorandum. I don’t want to say that the opposition
must have its people in the executive branch. It must by all means
control several Committees in the Parliament, as it was after the
1999 elections when it gave them the possibility to participate in
the processing of the legislative policy. Since the 2003 elections
all the initiatives of the opposition are blocked. As the opposition
was not given any chance to be integrated into the political field,
they went to the streets.
And so happened what happened.
– Could the April violations be prevented?
– There is one thing we must understand: if because of the obstacles of
the authorities or maybe because of their own mistakes the opposition
does not do its duty as a state institution which participates in
the governing of the country, there is always danger of suchlike
situations. These cases can be prevented, but in April 2004 the
authorities themselves created the situation as they wanted to prove
that the opposition will not reach anything even if the oppositional
wings join together.
– Do you mean to say that today there is danger of suchlike situation?
– Not today, as the society lives in an atmosphere of hopelessness. The
people do not pin hopes on anything for positive changes. In 2003
there was hope that there would be changes if the two oppositional
wings joined together. The hope was immediately eliminated by
the authorities. They warned the people beforehand that the joint
opposition will not reach anything.
Then they made a scenario and involved the opposition in it as a
result of which the opposition really failed to reach anything. This
was how the atmosphere was created.

ARMENIANS DEFEAT THE IRISHMEN IN HOCKEY
Panorama.am
17:27 26/04/06
The Armenian team of hockey won the first in history victory in the
official match under the aegis of International Hockey Federation. As
RIA News informs, the qualified tournament in the third division
of world hockey started in Reykjavik where the weakest teams are
gathered. The victory in that elimination tour means a rise in class
next year. In its first match the Armenian team yielded to the Turks
with the score 3:8, but on Tuesday the Armenians defeated the Irishmen
– 6:0. Goalkeeper Lavik Ghazaryan formed the first “dry” match in
the history of Armenian hockey and forward John Ghazanchyan made a
heat-trick and assisted his partners twice.
A year ago the Armenian team was defeated by the Irishmen with the
score 1:23 in the analogical tournament.

IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
By Gwynne Dyer
AZG Armenian Daily
27/04/2006
Two things about American immigration are different.
One is that the United States is the only large First World country
that has a long land border with a Third World country. The other
is that only the United States among developed countries possesses
a politically powerful domestic lobby that actively wants a large,
steady flow of unskilled immigrants, preferably illegal ones. Taken
together, these two oddities explain why immigration in America is
such an explosive topic, and why Congress is unable to pass any new
law regulating the flow.
The collapse last Friday of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate on a
new immigration bill probably marks an end for this year of the attempt
to impose some order on what many Americans see as out-of-control
illegal immigration. What split both parties and ultimately doomed the
law were President Bush’s proposals for an amnesty for nine million
of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants already in the
United States, and a new programme to admit an extra 400,000 temporary
“guest workers” every year.
The House of Representatives recently passed a much tougher law
involving serious penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants
and the construction of a 700-mile (1100-km.) fence along much of
the Mexican border, but with Congress now in recess for two weeks,
that is probably dead too. There is probably neither the time nor the
political will for the Senate to have another go at the issue before
the elections that are due this November.
What this is all about is Mexicans. The United States, contrary to
local belief, does not have a particularly high proportion of recent
immigrants compared to other industrialised countries. No more than
one person in eight is foreign-born in the US, considerably less
than in neighbouring Canada (where the ratio is one in five) and not
much more than in large European countries like Germany, France or
Britain. But nowhere else has so many illegal immigrants, nor so many
who are unskilled workers, nor such a high share from a single country.
Mexican nationals make up the great majority of the “undocumented
workers” (illegal immigrants) in the US economy. Their large numbers
and high visibility give rise to paranoid fears among some longer
established Americans that the United States is becoming a de facto
bilingual country. They also stir a wider concern that this large and
vulnerable work-force of illegal immigrants is deliberately maintained
by employers as a way of keeping the wages of unskilled workers down.
The language issue is largely a red herring: most newly arrived
Hispanic families have become fluent in English by the second
generation, just as previous waves of immigrants did before them. But
the argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from many equally
unskilled native-born Americans, and drive wages down for the rest,
has never been convincingly refuted, even though it remains politically
incorrect.
It’s not that native-born American high-school drop-outs “won’t do
those jobs.” They just won’t do them for five or eight dollars an hour
— or at least, a lot of them won’t. Many poor Americans simply have
no choice, however, and end up working long hours in miserable jobs
for half the money that an unskilled French or German worker would
earn for doing the same work.
Illegal immigrants are not a majority of the workers in most of
the fields where they find jobs; unskilled Americans are. (The only
job in which there are almost no native-born Americans is seasonal
agricultural stoop labour.) Professors George Borjas and Lawrence
Katz of the National Bureau of Economic Research recently calculated
that the real wages of US high-school dropouts would have ended up
eight percent higher in 1980-2000 if unskilled (and mostly illegal)
Mexican workers had been kept out, even if higher-skilled immigration
had continued at the existing rate.
One of the most ridiculous myths of American political discourse
is the argument that the US-Mexican frontier is too long to police
effectively and humanely. Here is a country that has landed people on
the Moon, and that currently maintains an army of 140,000 soldiers in
a hostile country halfway around the planet, claiming that it cannot
build and maintain a decent fence along the Mexican border. Instead,
we have been treated to a thirty-year political charade in which little
bits of fence are built in the traditional urban crossing places,
thus forcing illegal Mexican immigrants out into the desert where
many of them die — but enough still get through to keep America’s
low-wage industries fully manned.
Living right next to Mexico, a country where a large proportion
of the population lives in Third-World conditions, does create a
special immigration problem for the United States, but it is far
from insoluble.
It has only remained unsolved for decades because powerful economic
interests in the United States, with great influence over Congress,
do not want it solved.
All the other business that has been so earnestly debated in recent
week in the United States Senate — quotas for guest-workers,
amnesties for long-resident illegal immigrants, and so on — is just
the political cover that is needed to keep illegal immigrant labour
plentiful and unskilled wages low.

IRAN WILL STRIKE FIRST IN CASE THE USA USES THE TERRITORY OF AZERBAIJAN
Yerevan, April 25. ArmInfo. ‘American intelligence groups are at work
in Azerbaijan against Iran,’ stated in on interview to ‘Al-Ahram’
newspaper, Egypt, Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security
Council of Iran.
He stated that the American special services use the territories
of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan against Iran. According to him,
in case the military actions unfold, Iran may strike a blow at the
Baku-Tbilisi-Seyhan oil pipe line and the oil objects of Azerbaijan.
This was informed by iran.ru.