ANOTHER POLITICAL PRISONER TO BE RELEASED BEFORE PACE SESSION

A1 Plus | 16:49:14 | 06-09-2004 | Politics |

Edgar Arakelyan, who was sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in jail
this summer for hitting a policeman by empty plastic bottle during
the demonstration held on April 12 is expected to be released ahead
of the end of his term.

He has already served one-third of his term in jail. The decision is
to be made today at 16:00 in the first instance court of Nork-Marash.

Farhat’s new album to be released in Germany

Tehran Times
Sept 6 2004

Tehran Times Art Desk
TEHRAN (MNA) – The new album “Angels’ Birthday” by Iranian musician
Shahin Farhat will soon be released in Germany.

Early this year, Farhat recorded a new selection performed along with
the Armenia Youth Orchestra in Armenia. The new album also features
Armenian tenor Narbeh Cholakian performing songs based on poems by
Hafez, Khayyam, and Sa’di.

The album is being released in Germany by a German company and will
probably be distributed in Iran at the same time.

Farhat is quite satisfied with his new album, saying that this is the
first time an Iranian classical work has been recorded in a foreign
country and hopefully it will hit the market soon.

Armenian defense minister goes to Poland
By Tigran Liloyan

ITAR-TASS News Agency
September 5, 2004 Sunday 1:03 PM Eastern Time

YEREVAN, September 5 — Armenian Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisyan
went to Poland on Sunday to discuss bilateral cooperation with Polish
counterpart Jerzy Szmajdzinski, Sarkisyan’s press secretary Seiran
Shakhsuvaryan told Itar-Tass.

Sarkisyan will also visit a naval aviation squad, the Military Academy
of Poland and an electronics research and production center.

On September 7 he will go to Lithuania on an official visit to meet
with President Valdas Adamkus, defense and foreign ministers, the
Lithuanian Army commander, and head of the Parliamentary Commission on
National Security and Defense. Sarkisyan will sign an interdepartmental
agreement on the participation of Armenian servicemen in exercises
of the Lithuanian Military Academy.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
September 05, 2004, Sunday

Rock CDs

By James Delingpole

Kasabian Kasabian (RCA, pounds 12.99). Leicester’s Kasabian think
they’re the new guardians of British rock ‘n’ roll. ‘The Stones,
Zeppelin, the Pistols, the Gallaghers, we’re in that line,’ says
their singer Tom, and the damnedest thing is he might just be right:
not since Oasis can I recall a debut of quite such magnificent verve
and swagger.

They’re not as tight or clever as Franz Ferdinand, but then that’s
not their point: Kasabian (named after Charles Manson’s female getaway
driver – her surname means ‘butcher’ in Armenian) represent the bummed,
druggy, louche end of rock. It’s impossible to play them without
wanting to load up on drink and drugs and spend all night dancing,
which is what apparently goes on quite a lot on the 600-acre farm
where they live, record and throw free festivals.

They’ve got the cocky slouchiness and shuffling dance beat of the Happy
Mondays, the psychedelic languor of the Stone Roses, the attitude of
Oasis, the anthemic danciness of Stereo MCs. Who would have imagined
that the early 1990s would have made a comeback quite so soon and so
brilliantly reinvented? Truly Kasabian are the hound’s testicles.

The Libertines The Libertines (Rough Trade, pounds 13.99). In a
survey last year of the greatest British pop bands, the Guardian
decided The Libertines were even better than Radiohead and put them
at number one. I’m not sure I’d go quite so far – can I ever imagine
myself going: ‘God, I just have to put on a Libertines record right
this second, or I’ll die’?

No – but their second album does give you a good idea what the fuss
is all about. It’s excruciatingly honest – detailing the break-up of
the fraught, intense, almost marital relationship between frontmen
Carl Barat and heroin-addicted Pete Doherty. It has the throwaway
assurance of a band that knows it’s great and original and doesn’t
need to prove anything to anyone, and a sweet, eccentric, ramshackle
English charm. As produced by Mick Jones it sounds a bit sludgy and
home-made, but the heartfelt lyrics are compulsive and the debonairly
punkish melodies do grow on you.

Skinnyman Council Estate of the Mind (Low Life, pounds 13.99). You
wouldn’t guess it from his authentically black-sounding patois, but the
much-praised north London rapper Skinnyman is in fact white. His tunes
and samples aren’t bad but is he the British Eminem? Not lyrically
deft enough and way too earnest. Another Streets? Not funny enough.

The Caucasus mountains, a turbulent crossroads between Caspian and Black Sea

Agence France Presse — English
September 5, 2004 Sunday 2:03 AM GMT

MOSCOW Sept 5 — The Caucasus, scene of a hostage drama that ended
with hundreds of dead and wounded, is the turbulent home to scores of
ethnic and religious groupings prone to regular outbreaks of violence.

The mountainous region, roughly the size of California, forms a
natural crossroads between east and west, north and south and currently
comprises three newly independent states — Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia — along with part of the regional superpower, Russia.

The seven Russian republics in the region are themselves highly
diverse, including strife-torn Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North
Ossetia, Karachai-Cherkessia, Adygeya and Kabardino-Balkaria.

Dagestan alone, wedged between the Caspian Sea and Chechnya, is
inhabited by 30 nationalities, each with its own language and customs.

Many of the region’s languages are of Indo-European or Turkic origin,
others are indigenous.

Islam is well-established in the Caucasus, notably in Azerbaijan and
several of the Russian republics, but Orthodox Christianity in its
Armenian, Georgian and Russian variants is also widespread.

Its key position made the Caucasus a target for regional empires
including those of the Ottomans and Persia.

More recently the Russians have dominated the region, and many of the
conflicts of the past decade have been exacerbated by administrative
demarcations decided during the Soviet era and the wholesale
deportations ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during World
War II.

Nationalist sentiment among the rugged, fiercely independent mountain
peoples was never entirely extinguished, and aspirations to self-rule
contributed significantly to the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The first out-and-out conflict erupted in the late 1980s between
Armenians and Azeris scrapping over the remote enclave of Nagorno
Karabakh, administratively part of Azerbaijan but inhabited mainly
by Armenians.

That conflict, like others that have broken out subsequently, has
still not been resolved.

In 1992, in the months following the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
South Ossetia, part of Georgia, fought a brief war with government
forces to claim independence from Tbilisi, while Christian North
Ossetia, part of Russia, battled with Muslim Ingushetia over a
territorial claim.

The same year, Georgia’s western Abkhazia region — with suspected
Russian support — fought a year-long separatist war that won de
facto independence at a cost of thousands of dead and a ruined economy.

In December 1994 then Russian president Boris Yeltsin poured troops
into Chechnya to put down a separatist insurgency headed by Dzhokhar
Dudayev. Less than two years later he was forced to withdraw the
troops, leaving rebel leaders in control.

Chechnya’s de facto independence, marked by chaos and warlordism,
lasted less than three years as an incursion by rebels from Chechnya
into Dagestan triggered a further invasion by Russian troops, ordered
this time by Yeltsin’s prime minister and heir apparent Vladimir Putin.

Putin has made frequent claims since then to have stabilised the
situation in Chechnya, usually finding them belied by events.

The Caucasus region, particularly its Russian republics, are also
dogged by lawlessness despite — some say because of — the presence of
Russian troops, with oil-trafficking, clan warfare and hostage-taking
rampant.

Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
September 5, 2004 Sunday

DVD Review

by KAY SCHMIDT

DRAMA
Ararat
Imagine (MA)
In short: Focuses on the Armenian genocide, still denied by Turkey.

The players: Arsinee Khanjian, Christopher Plummer, Charles Aznavour,
Elias Koteas.

Verdict: A history lesson that is too wide-ranging to be involving.

AN ambitious, complex and informative film from Atom Egoyan (The
Sweet Hereafter), a Canadian of Armenian extraction. His deeply
personal mission is to draw attention to his heritage — the 1915
massacre of up to a million Armenians, which went mostly unnoticed
during World War I. He does so through several strands connecting
past and present, including a film within the film based on the
alleged atrocities.

Dangerous liaisons, a clever Greek and a deadly diamond. By Paul Skenazy
by Paul Skenazy

The Washington Post
September 5, 2004 Sunday
Final Edition

Garry Disher’s The Dragon Man (Soho, $23) is a lean, compelling
police procedural that uncovers rural Australian life in all its
hazardous dailiness. Detective Inspector Hal Challis runs the police
office on the Peninsula, “a comma of land hooking into the sea
south-east of Melbourne.” Women have been disappearing along the Old
Peninsula Highway. One body has been discovered. While mothers and
friends appeal for help in finding the other women who are missing,
Challis and his mates at the police station try to trace a pattern in
the crimes. They also cope with a rash of burglaries and a series of
mailboxes set on fire. And a car set on fire. And a house set on
fire.

Disher keeps his style curt, his bits of dialogue short, his
invasions of the psyche pointed. Weaving back and forth between the
police and the criminals, and among the uniformed cops and
detectives, Disher smoothly creates a choral portrait of the police
and the people they work with and for, delivering a community of
stories. Loneliness is as commonplace as the muddy roads and broken
fences. The police force that Challis commands is a varied lot,
including a wife frustrated by an indifferent husband and rebellious
daughter, a cop who falls for a cocaine addict and starts supplying
her from the evidence locker, a young recruit recovering from a car
accident who is as interested in her surfing teachers as in her
police procedures. Challis himself is the “dragon man” of the title
(a nickname that refers to his efforts to restore a vintage airplane,
a de Havilland DH 84 Dragon Rapide). He fluctuates between exhausted
patience on the phone with his ex-wife, who is in prison for trying
to kill him, and a discreet and intermittent affair he’s having with
a local newspaper reporter. Though Disher broadcasts the killer’s
identity a bit too early, this is still a first-rate piece of crime
writing: a dense, hard-nosed portrait of a world unto itself.

Ed McBain (a k a Evan Hunter), the grand master of the police
procedural, returns in Hark! (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), his 54th
book about the 87th Precinct cops, the crimes they solve, and the
lives they live outside the station house. The thief known as the
Deaf Man has returned, eager for revenge on the woman who left him
for dead (he shoots her in the first scene) and eager to mock the
87th crew with a series of teasing clues about his next crime. Steve
Carella, Meyer Meyer, Kling, Cotton Hawes and the rest start
receiving messengered notes that seem impossible to decipher. Some
prove to be anagrams, some palindromes, some quotes from Shakespeare.
The notes appear to define the date, and even hint at the crime —
except they hint at several crimes at once.

Meantime, the detectives are clueless about what to do with their own
lives. Carella is trying to avoid thinking about the joint wedding he
is planning for his mother and sister. Cotton Hawes is making it with
Honey Blair of Channel Four News, until someone starts shooting at
the two of them. Kling is worried that his sweetie is meeting
secretly with a man she used to date. And the Deaf Man (who calls
himself Adam Fen) wanders the city, visiting the New York Public
Library to view an original copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio on
display, showing intense interest in a classical violin recital. He
shacks up with a prostitute named Melissa Summers, whom he sends on
errands to find delivery men for his notes to Carella and Co. And he
waits.

McBain is playing for laughs, and he gets them, working skillfully to
create just enough intrigue to keep us interested in the bad jokes,
the puzzling riddles and the domestic melodramas. The whole
performance is deft and light, like a magician’s sleight of hand: The
trick is pulled off while you look the other way. There’s nothing
lasting here, except the pleasure of watching a master having fun —
and that’s a kind of Shakespearean delight in itself.

Just as the Olympics have brought Greece to the world’s attention
comes the first American publication of Petros Markaris’s Greek crime
fiction. Deadline in Athens, ably translated by David Connolly
(Grove, $23), features Inspector Costas Haritos, an edgy, cynical
policeman in a contemporary Athens more notable for its traffic jams
and rainy weather than its classical ruins. Like all good fictional
cops, Haritos is in trouble with his superiors and unwilling to
settle for the convenient, if unconvincing, solution. So when an
Armenian quickly confesses to killing two other Armenians, Haritos is
willing to follow a tip from Janna, a zealous, ambitious TV reporter,
that there is more to the case than appears. Then Janna herself is
found murdered, just before she was set to air a sensational news
story. And soon after, Janna’s successor is found dead as well.

The evidence from one murder slowly intersects with the next, leading
Haritos to an accused child molester who has just been freed, a love
affair Janna had with her station manager, and the shipping records
of a well-connected travel agency. At home he struggles
unsuccessfully to appease his wife, Adriani, who spends her days
watching TV crime stories, and to find time to see his daughter, who
is away at school.

But the real story here is the geography and culture of Athens. From
Haritos’s wily boss Ghikas, the chief of security, to the
Armani-suited corporate TV executives, this is a world where the rich
and powerful rule. Newscasters point a finger at an innocent man, and
Haritos spends days tracking him down as much to protect as to arrest
him; Haritos builds a case against a TV producer only to find himself
facing suspension. Ghikas urges him to be more “flexible,” while
Haritos charges on, pushing his way through doors that want to remain
closed.

Deadline is a satisfying if sometimes slow-paced read, the wayward
elements of the plot wandering in and out of focus as Haritos reaches
one wrong conclusion after another. Still, the material is rich, the
characters are drawn with depth, and Haritos himself is an intriguing
find: zealous in his work, more in love with his wife than he will
admit, suspicious by training, his only relief from work being the
hours he spends learning new words in his dictionaries at home. Two
more Haritos tales are promised for the near future, and I look
forward to reading them and spending more time with this snarling,
amiable Greek.

Skye Kathleen Moody’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Venus
Diamond returns for her seventh outing in The Good Diamond (St.
Martin’s, $24.95). This time Diamond’s name claims major attention as
a pun that echoes from start to finish in a story about diamond
trading and the international arms trade. Big Jim Hardy, a reclusive
prospector, discovers a 384-carat rough diamond he calls “Lac de
Lune,” after the lakebed where he found it, just outside the small
prospecting town of Yellowknife in Canada. But as he is about to
depart to have the diamond cleaved, his compound is invaded, he is
killed, the diamond is stolen, and his geologist is taken hostage.
Before he dies, however, Hardy has time to send an e-mail and scrawl
Venus Diamond’s name in blood.

Still with me? Because now the plot really gets farfetched. Sgt.
Roland Mackenzie of the Royal Canadian Mounties is convinced that
Hardy has written his murderer’s name and so arrests Diamond, who
then reveals that Big Jim Hardy was really Buzz Radke, a U.S. federal
undercover agent whom Diamond worked with years before. The escaping
thieves are, it seems, part of a militant group that dubs itself the
Nation of God’s Chosen Soldiers (or “Company 8”), headquartered on
the Lay-a-Day Chicken Ranch just across the U.S.-Canadian border.
They want to trade the diamond for arms, through a diamond trader in
New York who is sending the guns out West with two hoodlums in a
truck with New Jersey license plates. Evidence turns up that seems to
link Mackenzie to the killing, so suddenly he is arrested and needs
to turn to Diamond for help trying to clear his name. Three master
diamond cutters — in New York City, Antwerp and South Africa — are
working on models of the huge diamond to see if they can successfully
cleave the delicate stone. The New York traders are ruthlessly
working to procure the diamond and frighten competitors away from the
chase. And there are rumors that the stolen diamond itself might be a
fake substituted for the real stone to prevent just the kind of theft
that occurred.

Moody has always liked to stuff her books with plots until they burst
at the seams, and this outing is no different. White supremacists,
greedy hoodlums, devious diamond cutters, desperate jewel traders;
Canadian tundra, Seattle digs, border chicken farms, New York
streets, Antwerp hovels; a militant’s wife who offers a captive a
tape recorder and tapes so she can explain her life (and fill in the
plot details); a hoodlum who deserts his post to sit in the library
— the unbelievable elements and events spiral out at an alarming
pace. Lost in the frenzy is the issue of diamonds-for-guns — the
trade in what are called “blood” diamonds that support arms shipments
to militant groups worldwide. Lost too is Venus herself, who becomes
a cipher that we watch from increasing distances as she tries to make
sense of the confusing events. You will not be bored by this book. It
is filled with interesting diamond lore, and it clips along, jumping
with often comic cunning among its various plots. But Moody seems so
anxious to fit them all in that she sometimes sketches in her stories
rather than writing them out. The result is a confusing, faceless
tale. *

Paul Skenazy teaches literature and writing at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, where he is provost of Kresge College.

New Times Broward-Palm Beach (Florida)
September 2, 2004 Thursday

Blood & Sweat
But no tears, pansy boy

All eyes — and all of ESPN’s cameras — will be on Hollywood this
Friday, when seven big, bad boxers beat the bejesus out of seven other
big, bad boxers during Hard Knocks at the Hard Rock. In a battle for
the world championship of the flyweight division, undefeated Colombian
Irene “Mambaco” Pacheco (30-0), 33, goes up against 28-year-old Vic
Darchinyan (also undefeated, with a 21-0 record). Pacheco’s skill
is unrivaled among flyweights, but his challenger, an Armenian, has
been training in Australia. And you know what that means: He’s been
around those boxing kangaroos.

Darchinyan’s handlers are saying the D-man is going to mop the floor
with Pacheco and then hop away with the loser in his joey pocket. The
co-main event features Daniel Judah versus Luis Alberto Gimenez. The
undercard has Colombian Angel Priolo going ten rounds against Juan
Keb-Baas. Then there are the locals: Hollywood’s own Ed Paredes and
Johnny Pawlowski are scheduled to get in the ring at the Seminole
Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (1 Seminole Way, Hollywood). Tickets
cost $30 to $100; get them by calling 954-523-3309 or visiting
The first bout starts at 7 p.m. For more
information, see — Deirdra Funcheon

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The Denver Post
September 3, 2004 Friday
FINAL EDITION

Telluride’s signature role is introducing “the new”

Lisa Kennedy Denver Post Film Critic

Smitten. Beguiled. Blissed out. Pick your adjective to describe the
person who has experienced the Telluride Film Festival.

Telluride, which begins its 31st outing today, is the most beloved of
film festivals.

“The people that are there, whether they’re exhibitors, journalists,
whether they’re filmmakers or distributors, they’re there because
they love movies,” said Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures
Classics. “Otherwise they would be on the beach or on holiday
somewhere with the rest of America. There’s a genuine quality to film
fanaticism there, which is pretty pure.”

Cannes has glitz and the Meditteranean going for it. Toronto, with
its hundreds of movies and influx of talent grinding through the
junket juggernaut, is nearly all things to all filmgoers. Sundance
has indie cred and a hip, burgeoning music scene – not to mention
insta-celebs like Paris Hilton wandering Park City’s Main Street.

But Telluride proves there’s a gold standard in them thar hills.

“Telluride for us is the best festival in the U.S. in which to
discover films that are fresh and challenging,” Sony’s Barker said
when asked why Telluride matters. He went on to do what everyone does
when pondering the fest: He slipped into a reverie that had more to
do with seeing movies than selling them.

“I remember seeing ‘Blue Velvet’ there the first time, “River’s Edge’
there the first time,” he said. “It is known as the festival that
introduces the new.”

This year’s slate again features Telluride’s trademark mix of U.S.
and world premieres; tributes that honor the past and lay claim to
the future, and special presentations. This year’s offerings include
George Lucas’ screening of “THX 1138” and a conversation between
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” director and music-video whiz
Michel Gondry and film critic Elvis Mitchell.

Sony Classics has three films in the festival that hint at the
festival’s breadth: Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education,” starring
Mexican actor Gael García Bernal; Istvan Szabo’s “Being Julia”; and
Zhang Yimou’s “House of Flying Daggers,” which stars Zhang Ziyi as a
blind revolutionary during the waning of the Tang Dynasty.

“You could not get a more eclectic group of films,” Barker said.
“Each one is directed by a film master.” Szabo’s “Being Julia” stars
Annette Bening. “It reminds me of those Bette Davis movies,” said
Barker, “like ‘Mr. Skeffington’ – where the actress is at the center
and there all these characters at the periphery.”

This year, women aren’t pushing men to the outskirts, but they have
emerged as the festival’s theme.

“Both women in front of the screen and women behind the screen are a
major happening at Telluride this week,” said Bill Pence, who, along
with wife Stella and Tom Luddy, began this cinema love fest.

“We don’t set quotas,” he said. “We judge everything on its own
merits. But this year we’ve seen some of the best work by women and
performances by women that are really knockout.”

Bening, as well as Joan Allen (Sally Potter’s “Yes”), Ellen Barkin
(Todd Solondz’s “Palindromes”), Zhang Ziyi and Laura Linney, will be
in Telluride this weekend.

Linney, famed screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (“The Discreet Charm
of the Bourgeoisie”and “That Obscure Object of Desire”) and Greek
director Theo Angelopoulos are honorees at this year’s tributes.
Linney’s “P.S.” and “Kinsey” get their premieres this weekend.

Pence confided that his favorite two films in the festival are by
female directors. Since festival directors are notoriously
egalitarian parents about their festival children, he then offered,
“I would only tell you because they’re shorts and they’d be underdogs
and underseen.

“One is by a British woman named Andrea Arnold called ‘Wasp,’ ” he
said. “The the other is by a young Armenian woman named Maria
Saakyan. She has made a 27-minute film called ‘Proshanie.’ To me it
represents the best thing (Andrei) Tarkovsky did in his prime. And if
you know any Telluride lore at all, you know Tarkovsky is our idol,
our god.” For the uninitiated, the late Tarkovsky was a legendary
Russian filmmaker (“Andrei Rublev,” “Solaris”) who was honored at the
festival in 1982.

Cinema’s brightest history and its best future – that sums Telluride.

“The films just interact with each other,” says film critic Howie
Movshovitz, who teaches in Telluride’s weekend program. “You see
something old then you see something new, and over the course of four
days you realize they’re connected.”

Festival passes are sold out, but there are still ways to participate
in Telluride’s immersion therapy. (Check out tellu

ridefilmfestival.com for info.)

Festival co-director Bill Pence promises, “by the end of four days,
you’re sort of burned out if you do it right.” Here’s to doing it
right.

Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or
[email protected].

Merger of 2 California law firms forms legal giant
By Kevin Smith

San Gabriel Valley Tribune, West Covina, California
September 1, 2004, Wednesday

A merger of strength.

That’s the way Rich Kellner describes the joining of his Pasadena law
firm, Brown & Kellner LLP, with the downtown Los Angeles law office
of Kabateck & Garris LLP.

The newly expanded firm, Kabateck Brown Kellner LLP, will occupy the
former Kabateck & Garris offices at 350 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.
The office will represent plaintiffs in insurance bad faith,
construction defect, consumer class-actions, legal malpractice,
law firm partnership dissolutions and complex business disputes.

“It’s a merger of strength that will position the combined firm as
one of the dominate players in large plaintiff cases in Los Angeles,”
said Richard L. Kellner, 43, of Los Angeles, who is heading the new
law office along with partners Brian S. Kabateck, 43, and Michael R.
Brown, 53, who both live in Pasadena.

There’s plenty of experience to draw from.

Kabateck’s former firm has already handled a number of high-profile
cases involving the likes of Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon and rock
guitar slinger Ted Nugent.

Kabateck’s firm was also recently involved in reaching a $ 20 million
settlement with New York Life over life insurance policies written
for Armenians prior to the mass slayings of Armenians in 1915 in the
Ottoman Empire.

“We want to handle large, high-profile cases,” Kabateck explained.
“Those are the most interesting and the most rewarding. There is
nothing more rewarding than achieving a result that affects thousands
of people. I believe that whatever we can do as lawyers to affect
social change is important.”

Kellner’s former law office has also tackled some weighty cases,
including partnership disputes at other law firms.

“We recently came into a case after an arbitrator had awarded $ 7.2
million to one faction of another law firm,” he said. “We went to a
court of appeals and got the award vacated … that’s highly unusual.”

Brown said the merger makes good sense. “Combining our two
firms is a natural,” he said. “Each partner has strong trial and
negotiating skills and brings with him a successful consumer and
business-litigation background.”