Washington Post
May 28 2006
Obituary
Berg Paraghamian, 93, a former Martin Marietta aerospace engineer who
worked on NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, died of a stroke May 6
in the nursing unit at Maplewood Park Place in Bethesda.
Mr. Paraghamian worked for Martin Marietta in Baltimore and Denver
before being lent to NASA in 1960 to help with the planning of the
Apollo moon-landing program.
He spent two years at NASA, helping formulate the agency’s long-range
plan for space exploration.
Mr. Paraghamian returned to Martin Marietta, where he continued to
specialize in the design and development of aircraft and missiles. In
the 1950s, he helped develop the Titan I intercontinental ballistic
missile.
In 1970, he switched disciplines and became director of research and
development for the U.S. Maritime Administration in Washington. He
worked on the agency’s establishment of the National Maritime
Research Centers in Kings Point, N.Y., and Galveston, Tex. He retired
in 1980.
Mr. Paraghamian, a Bethesda resident, was born in Erzerum, Armenia.
He was a small child when his family, fleeing the Armenian genocide,
immigrated to the United States in 1915. He grew up in Belmont,
Mass., and graduated from Harvard University, where he also received
master’s degrees in education and engineering.
He served as a meteorologist with the Army Air Forces during World
War II and was stationed in Normandy after the D-Day invasion.
He was a moderator at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of
Christ in Bethesda and a member of the Cosmos Club.
Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Mary Paraghamian of Bethesda;
a son, James Berg Paragamian; and two grandchildren.

US Fed News
May 26, 2006 Friday 12:58 AM EST
USDA TO DONATE WHEAT FOR ARMENIA
US Fed News
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service has
issued the following press release:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced that it will
donate 2,500 metric tons of wheat to Armenian Technology Group, Inc.
(ATG), a private voluntary organization, for use in Armenia.
ATG will sell the wheat in Armenia and use the proceeds to continue
supporting the seed industry in the country over an 18-month period.
Project activities include a production loan program for
seed-producing farmers, and marketing and business development
services that will provide better market access, training and
information services to seed, vegetable, and fresh fruit growing
farmers.
The donation will be made under USDA’s Food for Progress program,
administered by the Foreign Agricultural Service. The supply period
for this donation is fiscal year 2006.
The Food for Progress program provides for donations of agricultural
commodities to needy countries to encourage economic or agricultural
reforms that foster free enterprise.
This year, USDA expects to donate around 560,000 tons of U.S.
commodities to 28 countries under Food for Progress.
For further information, contact Cristina Fundeneanu of FAS at (202)
720-6868, or by e-mail at [email protected].
FAS news releases are available on the Internet at

Federal News Service
May 26, 2006 Friday
STATE DEPARTMENT REGULAR BRIEFING
BRIEFER: SEAN MCCORMACK, DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN
LOCATION: STATE DEPARTMENT BRIEFING ROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.
[parts omitted]
Q Do you have anything on Dan Fried’s visit to the Caucasus?
MR. MCCORMACK: He did — he’s just back, I think today, or he’s on
his way back. He was there working with the Minsk Group co-chairs,
Russia as well as France, to see if we could find a way forward on
resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
I don’t have a readout for you, Nicholas, as to what sort of progress
they may have made. I know that the presidents of Azerbaijan and
Armenia are scheduled to get together pretty soon in Bucharest, in
Romania, I think the beginning of June. And the hope would be that
they might — might at that point be able to come to closure on some
of the issues that divide them. They made a run at it while they were
in France. They weren’t able to come to agreement. We, working with
the Minsk co-chairs, are hopeful that they can come together to
resolve whatever differences there are. These are tough issues, we
know; it’s going to require tough political decisions on both sides.
But we think that at the end of the day, taking those tough political
decisions will benefit all the peoples of that region.
Q Was this meeting in Minsk?
MR. MCCORMACK: It was in —
Q Yerevan.
MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah, I have to check, I have to verify for you. It
wasn’t in Minsk, though, I can tell you that.

Chicago Sun Times
May 21, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
The rise of Christian Nationalism: Across the United States,
religious activists aim to establish an American theocracy. A new
book offers an inside look at this growing right-wing movement.
by Michelle Goldberg, Salon
A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places
on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb
of Birmingham, Ala. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed
their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the
speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten
Commandments tablet made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama
Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached
him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the
stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved
signs with slogans like “No Moore!” and “No God in Court.” The boy
Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and
then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to
lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats — agents of
atheism — got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject
on the floor. As the song’s uplifting chorus played — “After you’ve
done all you can, you just stand” — a dancer in a white robe,
playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the
Moore character to his feet.
‘A CHRISTIAN NATION’
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that
included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore
himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus
in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake
the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That
reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current
culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments
— a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples’ lives —
with an apocalyptic urgency.
On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief
justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge’s order
to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he installed in the
Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous
figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms.
After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision, awarding
custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over
their lesbian mother, called homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral,
detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of
nature and of nature’s God upon which this Nation and our laws are
predicated,” and argued, “The State carries the power of the sword,
that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such
as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent
the subversion of children toward this lifestyle.”
To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a
martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God’s truth.
Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on Aug. 1,
2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up
the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral
Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the
monument was mounted, and on October 14, televangelist D. James
Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore’s brave, covert
installation on his show.
As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore’s fame grew. At
rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that
sounded very much like theocracy. “For 40 years we have wandered like
the children of Israel,” he told supporters in Tennessee. “It’s time
for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on
the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we
follow is not the Quran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation.”
By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a
movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials
came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to
rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined
themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.
Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky, wrote
an anthem called “Montgomery Fire” celebrating the demonstrations:
“We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove/but with the
whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away.” When I
met Bowman a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the
protesters, romantically, as the “ragamuffin warriors” fighting for
God against the atheist state.
“The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side,
the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the
last 40 years,” Bowman said. And finally, he said, God called on
Christians to defend themselves.
After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men
from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic
Defense spent months taking the monument — now affectionately called
“Roy’s Rock” — on tour all over the country, holding more than 150
viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart
parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and
in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of
federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In
solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten
Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian home-school
catalogs offered copies of a video titled “Roy Moore’s Message to
America.” When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor,
state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.
PARALLELS WITH NAZIS
A few days before Bush’s second inauguration, the New York Times
carried a story headlined “Warning from a Student of Democracy’s
Collapse,” about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor
emeritus of history at Columbia and scholar of fascism. It quoted a
speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and
the American religious right. “Some people recognized the moral
perils of mixing religion and politics,” he was quoted saying of
prewar Germany, “but many more were seduced by it. It was the
pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured
[Hitler’s] success, notably in Protestant areas.”
It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his 45-year-old
book, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the
Germanic Ideology, I shivered at its contemporary resonance. “The
ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of
national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture
and with the loss of authoritative faith,” he wrote. “They posed as
the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for
their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their
indifference to national greatness.”
Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics
are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History
professor Roger Griffin described the “mobilizing vision” of fascist
movements as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a
period of encroaching decadence.” Moore’s Ten Commandments has become
a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American
right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem
harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense,
the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group
says it exists to “neutralize the destructiveness” of America’s
“domestic enemies,” which include “biased liberal, socialist news
media,” “the ACLU,” and “the conspiracy of an immoral film industry.”
To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. “AVIDD reminds
all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United
States against all enemies, ‘both foreign and domestic,’ ” its Web
site says. “In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend
the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you
to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on
the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies.”
According to Jim Cabaniss, the 72-year-old Korean War veteran who
founded the group, it now has 33 chapters across the country. It’s
entirely likely that some of these chapters represent one or two men,
and as of 2005, the group didn’t seem large enough to be much of a
danger to anyone.
RESENTMENT TOWARD JEWS
Still, it’s worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have
flocked to rallies at which military men pledge to seize the reins of
power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, religious
leaders and politicians lend their support to Cabaniss’ cause. And at
least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething
resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America’s Christian
majority.
“People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of
our people,” Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin.
“Christians represent a huge percent, and we don’t believe that a
small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage.”
I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a
red, white and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was
saying that American Jews have too much power. “It appears that way,”
he replied. “They’re a driving force behind trying to take everything
to do with Christianity out of our system. That’s the part that makes
us very upset.”
We were standing outside the Texas Capitol building on a sunny
Saturday morning. A few hundred people from across the state had
turned out for the rally, which began at 10 a.m. Three or four men in
military uniforms sat with their wives on chairs at the top of the
Capitol steps. Four other men supported tall, coffin-shaped signs
labeled with the names of objectionable Supreme Court rulings.
The crowd was full of teenagers who had come on church buses and
families with young children. A white-bearded man in a leather biker
vest dragged a ten-foot-tall cedar crucifix painted red, white, and
blue. One woman wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Moore’s monument.
Another held a handwritten sign reading: “Ban Judges Not God/God
Rules.”
‘STAND UP, SPEAK UP’
Rick Scarborough, one of the headline speakers, called for a “million
Roy Moores” who will “stand up, speak up, and refuse to give up.” A
former football player at Stephen F. Austin State University,
Scarborough in recent years has positioned himself as a comer in the
Christian nationalist movement, riding church/state controversies to
ever higher prominence. In 2002, he left his post as pastor of
Pearland First Baptist Church — where he had mobilized members of
his flock in that Houston suburb to try to take over the city council
and school board — to form Vision America, a group dedicated to
organizing “patriot pastors” for political action. The same year,
Jerry Falwell christened him as one of the new leaders of the
Christian right.
Also speaking was John Eidsmoe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the
Air Force who wore full military dress. A professor at Thomas Goode
Jones School of Law, a Christian school in Montgomery, Ala., Eidsmoe
has written a number of Christian nationalist books including
Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers,
which argues that Calvinism inspired America’s founding document.
He’s a proponent of a Confederate doctrine called interposition,
which holds that states have the right to reject federal government
mandates they deem unconstitutional. “Implementation of the doctrine
may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or
may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance,” he
wrote in a manifesto titled “A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Roy
Moore.”
DOMINION THEOLOGY
Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a
fundamentalist Presbyterian and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of
them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts
that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have
the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.
Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a
fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John
“R.J.” Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York
City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the
genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of
California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian
missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer,
churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools
and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical
law. He called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers and
unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy
and “the great love of the failures and cowards of life.”
‘A CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO’
Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers
believe Jesus won’t return until after Christians establish a
thousand-year reign on Earth. While other Christians wait for the
messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves.
Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists.
They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ’s
return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the
tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to
a certain apathy — why worry if the world is about to end and you’ll
be safe from the carnage?
Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious
right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in
this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an
American who founded L’Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps
where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as
the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on
his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential
books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian
Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest
between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying,
“These two worldviews stand as totals in complete antithesis to each
other in content and also in their natural results — including
sociological and government results, and specifically including law.”
Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas
of America as an originally Christian nation. In A Christian
Manifesto, he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American
flag, but added, “None of this, however, changes the fact that the
United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we
today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to
government.”
Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply
involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil
disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. “It is time we
consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to
God’s Law it abrogates its authority,” he wrote.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on
premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he
co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to
whom he dedicated his book The Battle for the Mind. That book married
Schaeffer’s theories to a conspiratorial view of history and
politics, arguing, “Most people today do not realize what humanism
really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country —
and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today
can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the
UN, education, TV and most of the other influential things of life.
“We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them
with pro-moral political leaders,” LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made
alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple
of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists
together to form the Coalition on Revival in order to lay a blueprint
for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of
the coalition’s steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North,
creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy and the Reverend Donald
Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, the coalition developed 17 “worldview”
documents, which elucidate the “Christian” position on most aspects
of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to
differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the
ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The
documents outline a complete political program, with a “biblically
correct” position on issues such as taxes (God favors a flat rate);
public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts
(“We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as
art or ‘free speech’ “).
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of
a high school curriculum “using the COR Worldview Documents as
textbooks.” Since then, there has been a proliferation of schools,
books and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian
worldview in students and activists.
‘WORLD CONQUEST’
Those who don’t have a year to spare can attend one of more than a
dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches
nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian
nationalist historian David Barton; David Limbaugh (Rush’s born-again
brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003,
Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick
Scarborough’s former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd,
“Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all
areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only
Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that
we find in this world. Only Christianity.”
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply
responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is
itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. But Christian
nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance. In
his book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political
Action, George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy’s
Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy
responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have
dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life
and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It
is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are
after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World
conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We
must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never
settle for anything less. . . . Thus, Christian politics has as its
primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families,
institutions, bureaucracies, courts and governments for the Kingdom
of Christ.”
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon. Her book Kingdom
Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism has just been published by
W.W. Norton.

Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
May 26, 2006 Friday
Final Edition
BOOKS AT A GLANCE
by Peter Mergendahl, Jane Dickinson, Mark Graham & Jennifer Miller,
Special to the News
THRILLERS
Hardscrabble Road
By Jane Haddam (St. Martin’s, $24.95). Grade: A-
After 20 books featuring the Armenian-American FBI agent Gregor
Demarkian, one would suspect that Jane Haddam would have her craft
and character down pat. No surprise, then, when this latest Demarkian
tale is spot-on. Like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, there’s no
slowing this sleuth down. Demarkian, though retired from the FBI,
just can’t stay away from the hunt, even as he tries to convince
himself he wants to.
He has quite a hunt on his hands here. A charismatic, power-hungry,
right-wing-ranter-of-a-radio-host named Drew Harrigan has been caught
with handfuls of prescription painkillers and has disappeared into a
closed-door rehabilitation center. Sound familiar? Before
disappearing into therapy, Harrigan had pointed a finger at an
alcoholic, homeless man named Sherman Markey as his source for the
drugs.
With the help of a legal advocacy group, Markey sues Harrigan for
slander and libel and then disappears back into the streets of
Philadelphia. Now Markey’s court appearance is looming, and the group
representing him turns to Demarkian for help in locating him.
What he first assumes will be a one- or two-day task soon takes on
darker tones. There are a great many people, it seems, who have
reasons for Markey to disappear permanently, including a left-wing,
Nobel-prize-winning professor; a Carmelite nun; and a Philadelphia
mayoral candidate. Oh, and of course there is murder to bloody the
pot.
Rife with political insights, subtle humor at all her characters’
expense and a keen eye for telling a story from multiple characters’
diverse perspectives, Hardscrabble Road is as deep as it is wide. A
few minor squabbles include a slight over-indulgence in esoteric
academic outlooks and the author’s assumption that readers will wait
– through 60 pages of elliptical and sometimes confusing plot setups
– before a word from the main character.. All in all, this is a
thriller for the thoughtful, though Rush Limbaugh fans may want to
give it a wide berth.

Tulsa World (Oklahoma)
May 26, 2006 Friday
Final Home Edition
Let’s stop the shouting and solve the problem
by TAD BARTIMUS
The Los Angeles cabbie who’d passed us by 10 minutes earlier rolled
up to the curb: “You tired ladies get in. I’ll take you where you
want to go.”
During the ride to our hotel, Mr. A, as he asked us to call him, told
of emigrating from Armenia and becoming a naturalized American
citizen. What did he think of the growing illegal-alien crisis in his
adopted country?
“It has to be fair to everyone. I don’t want to see people sent back
to Mexico. Most of them work hard, spend money, are good people. They
do jobs nobody else will do. But they should earn the right to be
here like I did.
“I had to go through the process,” said Mr. A, now in his 50s.
Speaking in accented English he learned during a six-month paid
language course, he said the three years of citizenship paperwork
that cost him $5,000 “without a lawyer” were worth it.
“I earned the right to be here legally, to vote and pay taxes and
serve on a jury,” he said, navigating through traffic in his
independently owned taxi. “First, I got a visa in Armenia. When I
came to America, I got a white card, then a green card so I could
earn enough money to live. I learned about the Constitution. My kids
went to public school, made good grades.
“Tomorrow,” he said proudly, “my daughter graduates from law school.”
The words on the Statue of Liberty say, “Give me your tired, your
poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” They don’t say,
“Keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in.” What makes us strong is our
willingness to accept others, mix our ideas with theirs and celebrate
our differences.
We can’t say no to Mexico any more than we can say no to hurricanes
and earthquakes. Perhaps if we’d been a better friend to that
developing nation, its most hopeless people wouldn’t be so desperate
to migrate.
Some say that if we help Mexico develop its petrochemical industry,
there will be plenty of work for everyone. Certainly that would be
better than offering nothing, which is what we’ve done for 200 years.
NAFTA notwithstanding, we can do much more to stimulate the growth of
the Mexican economy. A more prosperous, egalitarian neighbor to the
south means less pressure on us and much more hope for them.
Before we voice an opinion about immigration, we should turn down the
volume on talk radio, pull the plug on TV pundits and educate
ourselves instead of depending on Lou Dobbs, Minuteman vigilantes,
campaigning congressmen and special-interest lobbyists who spoon-feed
us biased, inaccurate information.
Once we’ve researched firsthand the big picture — illegal
immigration’s impact on social-welfare programs (in many states
overwhelmed), our national economy (billions of dollars contributed),
crime statistics (fluctuates regionally) and the lunatic fringe on
both sides of the debate — we should seek out naturalized citizens
and illegal immigrants willing to share their stories.
“Illegal immigrants are everywhere,” said my retired friend Andy, who
volunteers as an English teacher at a Los Angeles nonprofit learning
center. He said many of the adult students are increasingly
terrified.
“Everything already is a hassle because they’re flying under the
radar,” he said. “Now they’re scared to death they’ll lose their
children if they’re caught and deported.”
Andy said his illegal-immigrant students “study so hard and are so
eager to learn, yet many of them are afraid to apply their skills to
get better jobs because that raises their profile and brings them
more attention.”
It’s implausible to think the U.S. government can force millions of
undocumented workers back to Mexico permanently.
Before he drove away to prepare for his daughter’s law-school
graduation party, Mr. A said, “We can solve this immigration problem
if everybody would stop shouting, calm down and be fair.”
Spoken like a true American.
Newspaper Enterprise Association

Bucharest Daily News, Romania
May 28 2006
Armenian, Azerbaijani presidents to meet in Romania
The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in Romania,
possibly next month, government spokesmen said Friday, for talks
aimed at resolving a nearly two-decade conflict over the disputed
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Government officials in Yerevan, Armenia and the Azerbaijani capital
Baku both confirmed that Armenian President Robert Kocharian and his
Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliev, were intending to meet, but
gave no further details.
The two Caucasus leaders are expected to attend a forum for Black Sea
countries scheduled for June 5 in the Romanian capital.
Talks held between the two presidents in France in February ended in
failure, despite international mediators’ efforts to push the leaders
to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh’s status.
The enclave is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic
Armenians, who have administrated it since an uneasy 1994 cease-fire
ended six years of full-scale fighting.
Sporadic border clashes have grown more frequent since the breakdown
of talks and the lack of resolution has hindered development
throughout the strategic Caucasus region.

Terror alert as Caspian oil pipeline opens
Tom Parfitt in Georgia
Sunday May 28, 2006
The Observer
In the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, a long line of broken mud cuts
across the meadows. If you go anywhere near it, camouflaged guards carrying
automatic weapons emerge from the forest beyond.
These guards in the Borjomi region of Georgia – trained by US army and SAS
veterans – are pawns in a new great game gripping Central Asia: their job is to
protect the oil pipeline buried 10ft below.
‘A terrorist attack is the greatest threat we face,’ says the guards’
commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Giorgi Pantskhava, an energetic Georgian
in desert fatigues and aviator shades.
The $4bn (£2.2bn) BTC – Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan – pipeline comes on stream today
It is key in American plans to reduce dependency on Opec oil producers in
the turbulent Middle East. Pumping oil 1,000 miles from the Caspian sea tothe
Mediterranean through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, it will avoid Russia-
increasingly seen by the US as a resurgent superpower prepared to use control
of energy resources as a political weapon.
The pipeline – 70 per cent funded by the World Bank, the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, and export credit agencies – took three years
to build and will carry up to one million barrels of oil a day to western
markets. Yet its position on the faultline between Russia and its estranged
former Soviet neighbours makes it a shaky bet.
The fiercely pro-Washington government of Georgia’s president, Mikhail
Saakashvili, welcomed the BTC with open arms, saying transit payments wouldhelp
to kick-start the economy of the faltering ex-Soviet state.
Since coming to power in 2004 Saakashvili has steered his country away from
Russia towards co-operation with the US. ‘Georgia will be America’s partnerin
spreading democracy around the world,’ Bush told rapturous crowds during the
first visit of a US president to the country last year. Yet the pipeline,
constructed and run by a BP-led consortium, will open in the teeth of bitter
opposition.
Green campaigners say the route passes too close to Georgia’s Borjomi Gorge,
a tourist spot with mineral water springs and abundant wildlife. ‘If there is
even a minor oil leak here then the reputation of the area will be
irreparably damaged,’ says Vano Shalutashvili, of the Borjomi People’s
Democracy Institute, a non-governmental organisation that has fought for the
pipeline to be diverted. A leak on one section was detected in a test run
this month.
Critics also say BTC passes too close to volatile breakaway regions in both
Georgia and Azerbaijan, making it vulnerable to sabotage that could cause a
catastrophic spill.
Georgia’s interior ministry is taking no chances. Original plans to patrol
the BTC route with unmanned reconnaissance aircraft were dropped in favour of
small, roving anti-terrorist squads. Yet even these might not be able to
prevent an attack, as another guard admitted: ‘Iran may try to strike it with
a missile and we shouldn’t forget that Russia is the primary expert for
techniques in blowing up pipelines,’ he said.
Locals are furious with BP, claiming a host of negative consequences from the
construction: houses damaged by heavy traffic, low compensation for lost
land, and polluted springs. Pavel Poshnakhov, 45, a villager in Tsikhisjvari,
said he had to show his passport to guards when he crossed the corridor with
his cattle, or went to collect firewood.
Special reports
Oil and petrol (,,608464,00.html)

Useful links
Opec ()
International Energy Agency ()
American Petroleum Institute
( h.htm)
Energy Institute ()

Sunday, May 28, 2006
First Loading from BTC pipeline begins at Ceyhan
Cihan News Agency 27/05/2006
Caspian oil pumped through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline has
reached the Mediterranean Turkish port of Ceyhan, and the first loading of
Azeri oil to tankers will take place today.
The British Hawthame tanker will dock at the Ceyhan terminal to load the
Azeri oil.
There will be no an inauguration ceremony to mark the transfer of the crude
oil to oil tankers today, but the presidents of Turkey, Georgia and
Azerbaijan, the three countries the BTC passes through, are to meet on
July 13th in Ceyhan for official ceremony.
The Azeri oil in the pipeline covered 1,076 km of its total voyage in
Turkey. The long awaited Azeri oil has arrived at the Ceyhan marine terminal
on the Mediterranean coast last week after a year of delay and re-scheduling.
The 1,760 km-pipeline had originally been scheduled for opening in the
second half of 2005. However, construction of the Turkish section of the
pipeline was not completed on time, causing oil export from the terminal to
be delayed.
The first crude oil was pumped from the Azeri capital Baku on May 10, 2005
and arrived at the Turkish border on November 17, 2005.
Turkey will gain annual $300 million from the pipeline which will transport
daily 1 million barrel oil.
The BTC pipeline runs from the Azeri capital Baku, passes by the Georgian
capital Tbilisi and reaches its destination at the Turkish Mediterranean port
of Ceyhan.
The pipeline is expected to reduce tanker traffic through the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles.

PanARMENIAN.Net
Russia Cannot Be Responsible for All Post-Soviet
Conflicts

27.05.2006 15:15 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Russia cannot be responsible for all post-soviet
conflict, Aide of Russian President Sergey Prikhodko stated at a
meeting with journalists in Azerbaijan. In his opinion, if Russia’s
efforts are needed, it will do even more than necessary. «However,
Russia cannot impose its will upon independent states. A solution,
which is not acceptable for the Azeri people, cannot be imposed,»
Sergey Prikhodko said, reports the Echo newspaper.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress