Armenian Troops Violate Cease-fire, Killing An Officer
Baku Today, Azerbaijan
June 7 2004
Armenian troops shot an Azerbaijani army officer to death and wounded a
soldier in southwestern Cocuq Mercanli village area of frontline early
Monday, press office of the ministry of defense said, according to ANS.
The press office identified the killed as Captain Zaur Ismailov, 28,
and the wounded as Ramil Baghirov, 19.
The killed officer had been drafted from Samukh District. According to
the press office, Armenian troops also started firing at Azerbaijan’s
army positions in Qizil Hacili and Mazam villages of northwestern
Qazakh District late Sunday and shootings continued the following
day. Azerbaijani troops retaliated the enemy, the press office added.

National Review Online
June 7 2004
Moscow’s Spring
Ronald Reagan at Moscow State University.
EDITOR’S NOTE: President Ronald Reagan delivered this speech at Moscow
State University on May 31, 1988.
Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and
telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message, perhaps, but also
some of the most important business of this summit. It is a message
of peace and goodwill and hope for a growing friendship and closeness
between our two peoples.
First, I want to take a little time to talk to you much as I would
to any group of university students in the United States. I want to
talk not just of the realities of today, but of the possibilities
of tomorrow.
You know, one of the first contacts between your country and mine
took place between Russian and American explorers. The Americans were
members of Cook’s last voyage on an expedition searching for an Arctic
passage; on the island of Unalaska, they came upon the Russians,
who took them in, and together, with the native inhabitants, held a
prayer service on the ice.
The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with
vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave
the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are
responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.
They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact,
one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was
started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage
behind their home.
Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of
experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of
all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the
successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the secret
of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in their
struggles along the way — yes, it’s what they learned from failing.
Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of the truth,
experience is the greatest teacher.
We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around the
world — places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan
have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in the
industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in the
sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net exporter of
food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change that are blowing
over the People’s republic of China, where one-quarter of the world’s
population is now getting its first taste of economic freedom.
At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of the
most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin America in
the 1970’s, only a third of the population lived under democratic
government. Today over 90 percent does. In the Philippines, in the
Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic elections are the
order of the day. Throughout the world, free markets are the model for
growth. Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured.
We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact, it’s
something of a national pastime. Every four years the American people
choose a new president, and 1988 is one of those years. At one point
there were 13 major candidates running in the two major parties, not
to mention all the others, including the Socialist and Libertarian
candidates — all trying to get my job.
About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and
1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private enterprise,
fiercely independent of the government, report on the candidates,
grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In
the end, the people vote — they decide who will be the next president.
But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections. Go to any American
town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of synagogues and
mosques — and you’ll see families of every conceivable nationality,
worshipping together.
Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught
the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights — among them life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, that no government can justly deny —
the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom
of assembly, and freedom of religion.
Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent judge,
beholden to no government power. There every defendant has the right
to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and women — common
citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who weigh the evidence and
decide on guilt or innocence. In that court, the accused is innocent
until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman, or any official,
has no greater legal standing than the word of the accused.
Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open, sometimes
heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can
be done to correct them. Turn on the television, and you’ll see
the legislature conducting the business of government right there
before the camera, debating and voting on the legislation that will
become the law of the land. March in any demonstrations, and there
are many of them — the people’s right of assembly is guaranteed in
the Constitution and protected by the police.
But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to question,
and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing
revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us
to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put
forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire
among the people. It is the right to stick – to dream – to follow
your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one
in a sea of doubters.
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority
of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual
life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world
has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.
America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our ties to
you are more than ones of good feeling; they’re ties of kinship. In
America, you’ll find Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, peoples from
Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They come from every part of this
vast continent, from every continent, to live in harmony, seeking a
place where each cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its
diverse strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.
Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to visit
relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won’t be long before
all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans, Baltic-Americans,
Armenian-Americans, can freely visit their homelands, just as this
Irish-American visits his.
Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic,
but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth. Because
they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned, but a
gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world. “Reason
and experience,” said George Washington in his farewell address,
“both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in
exclusion of religious principle. And it is substantially true,
that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep
government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on power to
keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life,
the true sources of value found only in family and faith.
I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they
are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If this
globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all the
possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations must
renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist foreign
policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal — not a
tactical stage in a continuing conflict.
I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country —
perhaps you know it — whose evocative refrain asks the question,
“Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that silence
lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there; beneath those
trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my wife; then you will
have to ask no more, ‘Do the Russians want a war?'”
But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced you on
the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of the Pacific,
or the European battlefields where America’s fallen were buried
far from home? What if we were to ask their mothers, sisters, and
sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too, and you’ll find the same
answer, the same longing in every heart. People do not make wars,
governments do — and no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her
sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A
people free to choose will always choose peace.
Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After
a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages
the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war
between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true unity
as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany
and one with Japan, but now the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan
are two of our closest allies and friends.
Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of
strain, but they’re the frictions of all families, and the family of
free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I can
tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my lifetime
to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the problem of
trade disputes between America and a growing, exuberant, exporting
Soviet Union that had opened up to economic freedom and growth.
Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our
responsibility to have come true.
Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times
in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs
the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope, when the
accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free.
We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but
we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this
Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope — that
freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoy’s grave,
will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your people
and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the marvelous sound of
a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to
a new world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace.
Thank you all very much and da blagoslovit vas gospod! God bless you.

PACE Official Accused Of Taking Armenian ‘Bribe’
By Hrach Melkumian 08/06/2004 00:28
Radio Free Europe, Czech Rep.
June 7 2004
A senior official from the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly
(PACE) monitoring the fulfillment of Armenia’s membership commitments
was accused by the Armenian opposition on Monday of being effectively
bribed by the authorities during a visit to Yerevan last week.
Poland’s Jerzy Jaskiernia, one of the two Armenia rapporteurs of the
PACE’s Monitoring Committee, arrived for a high-profile presentation of
the Armenian version of his book dedicated to the 45-nation assembly.
Its translation and publication was funded by the leadership of
the Armenian parliament, with speaker Artur Baghdasarian personally
attending the presentation.
The book had previously appeared only in the Polish and English
languages. Speaking to journalists at the event, both Baghdasarian
and Jaskiernia denied any political motives behind the publication.
The latter argued in particular that the book’s subject is irrelevant
to Armenian politics.
However, opposition leaders claim that Baghdasarian’s gesture was
aimed at influencing the content of a crucial report which Jaskiernia
and the other rapporteur, Rene Andre of France, will submit to the
PACE ahead of its summer session later this month. The two men are
to inform the Strasbourg lawmakers whether the Armenian authorities
have implemented the recommendations of their recent resolution on
the political crisis in Armenia.
“I regard it as a bribe. I think that there are corrupt people in
the Council of Europe and any other international structure,” Aram
Sarkisian of the opposition Artarutyun (Justice) alliance charged.
“That person was given a present in the expectation of drawing up
a corresponding document. They could have done it in the autumn,
after the drafting of the document,” Sarkisian added.
The PACE resolution denounced the Armenian government’s heavy-handed
response to the opposition campaign for President Robert Kocharian’s
resignation, saying that it is “contrary to the letter and the
spirit” of its earlier recommendations to Yerevan. It warned that the
authorities must release all opposition detainees, scrap “unjustified
restrictions” on anti-Kocharian demonstrations, investigate their
“human rights abuses” or face the possibility of sanctions next
September.
The opposition insists that the authorities have failed to comply with
the resolution by continuing to arrest and imprison its activists
and supporters. Armenian officials, for their part, have disagreed
with the PACE criticism and say they are determined to prove the
opposite. Jaskiernia and Andre are due in Yerevan on Friday on a
fact-finding mission which will likely determine the content of
their report.
The Polish lawmaker personally presented the draft resolution during
a debate in Strasbourg on April 28. The initial version of the
document contained language discouraging the Armenian opposition from
challenging President Robert Kocharian’s disputed 2003 reelection
with street protests. But that was dropped after strong objections
voiced by some PACE members.
Nonetheless, Jaskiernia and the Monitoring Committee pushed through
the assembly a passage saying that serious irregularities “did not
decisively change the outcome of the elections nor invalidate their
final results.” They also blocked opposition attempts to secure a
PACE endorsement of a “referendum of confidence” in Kocharian.

ARMENIA’S FOREIGN MILITARY POLICY BASED ON COMPLEMENTARITY, SENIOR OFFICER SAYS
ArmenPress
June 7 2004
YEREVAN, JUNE 7, ARMENPRESS: A senior army officer told reporters last
weekend that the army is fully prepared to accept the first conscripts,
granted the right to alternative military service. Lieutenant Colonel
Sedrak Sedrakian, the chief of the legal department at the defense
ministry, said all relevant infrastructures will be ready on July 1.
He said the major task faced now by the defense ministry is to ensure
a full application of the Law on Alternative Military Service. He
said the locations where the alternative conscripts will serve, the
design of their special uniforms will be submitted soon to government’s
approval. The army officer said everything must be done to organize
alternative military service in a way that not violate the conscripts’
rights concurrently avoiding jeopardizing the national security of
the country.
Sedrakian also said some 120 million Drams were collected from
Armenian citizens who dodged mandatory military service escaping
from Armenia in early nineties. Under the law, that came into effect
on March 1, such citizens who have reached the age of 27 can avoid
criminal responsibility after coming back to Armenia by paying around
$3,500. He said a special inter-agency commission founded to consider
such application can consider some 30 applications a day
In a related development, Major-General Mikael Melkonian, the head of
a defense ministry department for external relations and cooperation,
reiterated that Armenia’s foreign military policy is based on what
is known as “complementarity.” Speaking at special discussions at the
American University of Armenia on the existing problems in the Armenian
armed forces, the General said the major points of Armenian military
policy is to keep the military and strategic balance, constructive
cooperation will all interested forces and building the security
environment in the region.
He pointed to Armenia’s allied partnership with Russia and its
membership to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which he
said is the main security guarantee of Armenia and also to Armenia’s
close cooperation with NATO within the frameworks of the latter’s
Partnership for Peace program, underlying the presence of an Armenian
peace-keeping platoon in Kosovo. “Unlike some years ago when Armenia’s
participation in Partnership for Peace program was limited to attending
several training courses, now we are moving towards close practical
exercises,” he said.

THE CENTRAL BANK OF ARMENIA AND UNDP JOIN EFFORTS TO DEVELOP
ArmenPress
June 7 2004
YEREVAN, JUNE 7, ARMENPRESS: The Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) and
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched the first
e-payment system in Armenia. Mr. Tigran Sargsyan, Chairman of the
CBA and Ms. Lise Grande, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident
Representative, presented the initiative to the mass media and the
first online payment was made by plastic card.
The e-payment system is a joint initiative of the Armenian Card
(ArCa) Unified Payment System and UNDP. Through the system, online
payments for public utilities, including telephone, electricity, gas,
and water can be made using ArCa cards. The system can also be used to
buy top-ups for the ArmenTel mobile prepaid system and Arminco Internet
services. Plans are also underway to expand the system to allow ArCa
cardholders to shop online and benefit from other paid services.
The online payment system is based on the highest standards of
transaction security and user convenience. The long-term goal of the
system is to expand Armenia’s infrastructure for non-cash transactions
and create a reliable and user-friendly environment for e-Commerce.
In her comments, Ms. Lise Grande, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP
Resident Representative, noted: “It’s important to see this online
payment system as an important step in developing an information
society in Armenia. Modern Information and Communication Technologies
are essential for creating a modern economy in Armenia and ensuring
equal access to information for all citizens.”
Mr. Tigran Sargsyan, Chairman of the Central Bank of Armenia,
reiterated the “significance of the e-payment system for the further
development of the banking system in Armenia, particularly the
establishment of e-banking.”
The Armenian Card was established by the CBA and ten commercial banks
in March 2000 with the aim of developing a new unified payment system
in Armenia. Today, 13 commercial banks are part of the ArCa system,
and more than 46,000 plastic cards of this type are in circulation.

PRESIDENT KOCHARIAN HAS WORKING MEETINGS
ArmenPress
June 7 2004
YEREVAN, JUNE 7, ARMENPRESS: Armenian president Robert Kocharian had a
working meeting today with the chairman of the State Water Committee
Andranik Andreasian. Kocharian’s press office said the committee
chairman introduced the president to the ongoing reforms of the
sector and the process of implementation of projects in cooperation
with international organizations.
During another working meeting the president discussed today the
shortcomings and problems reported during special examinations,
set for secondary school graduates, claiming for gold medals, equal
to finishing school with honors. A presidential oversight service
was watching the examinations as observers. Kocharian was quoted by
the press office as saying that there is a range of related issues
that cannot be ignored, especially that in a month time entrance
examinations to state-run universities are set to start.
“All reported shortcomings should be completely eliminated during the
university entrance examinations,” Kocharian was quoted as saying. He
said schools lack proper supervision, and a practice is formed that
disgraces the idea of gold medals. The president said graduation from
secondary school with honors has become a kind of an end in itself
with a prospect of easing the entrance examination to university and
‘this motive” has deformed a lot of things at schools. The president
said his conclusion was based on observations, reported to him by
oversight service.
Vahram Barseghian, the head of the oversight chamber, presented the
facts, shortcomings and other problems of concern, which the service
has identified. He said many of graduates, claiming for gold medals,
failed to confirm their high knowledge of separate school subjects
and also a great number failed to participate in the examinations,
which he said was “an evidence that school principals violate the
principles of choosing graduates, claiming of gold medals.”
Kocharian has instructed the government to consider the issue of
granting graduates with honors privileges during university entrance
examinations.

HARRISON’S UNRUFFLED BY ARMENIAN
By Jim Black
Sunday Express
June 6, 2004
WBO featherweight champion Scott Harrison isn’t in the least fazed by
the news Armenian rival William Abelyan has enlisted the services of
Mexican legend Manuel Medina in a bid to plot a world title takeover.
Harrison insists that Abelyan is wasting his time after claiming:
“There is no more awkward southpaw than Medina – and I beat him.”
But Abelyan believes that his own southpaw stance will prove to be
Harrison’s undoing – with the help of five-time world champion Medina.
Abelyan says having 33-year-old Medina in his camp is effectively
the final piece in the jigsaw, because the Mexican knows Harrison’s
style inside-out after gaining a split points decision against the
Glaswegian last July.
The fact Harrison, 26, won back the crown at Braehead four months
later when he inflicted an 11th round stoppage on Medina appears to
have escaped Abelyan’s notice.
“Medina has a wealth of experience and can help me plan my tactics
to beat Harrison, ” said the 25-year-old challenger.
“With Medina in my camp I have a huge advantage over Harrison because
he is supplying me with vital information.”
But Harrison posed the question:
“Why does Abelyan need another boxer to tell him how to fight?
Surely he is capable of planning his own tactics.
“Abelyan says he’s been studying videos of me and when he gets in
the ring he’ll know me better than I know myself.
“But by the sound of things he doesn’t know too much about me if he
has to rely on Medina to fill him in.
“Abelyan has had plenty to say so far but I much prefer to do my
talking in the ring.
“If Abelyan imagines that he has me rattled with his comments he’s
wrong – I’ve heard it all before.”
Harrison has been sparring with Englishman Patrick Mullings, the
former British and Commonwealth champion he out-pointed in 2000 to
take the latter crown.
The arm muscle injury which forced Harrison to postpone the planned
May 29 meeting has healed completely and the champion is adamant that
he’s in great shape.
“Mullings has been an ideal sparring partner because, like Abelyan,
he is a southpaw and he is a good mover who throws a lot of punches,
” said Harrison, who insists that he won’t stop until he is recognised
as the top featherweight in the world.
He added: “The Americans still rank Manny Pacquiao, Juan Marquez
and Marco Antonio Barrera ahead of me and I won’t rest until I am
recognised as No 1 “But for the time being I am concentrating only on
beating Abelyan. I am entirely focused on what lies ahead on June 19.”
Harrison, already a two-time world champion, hasn’t made it into the
top 10 British ring stars of all time, according to a vote by Boxing
News readers.
But two other Scottish ring greats do feature in the list topped by
former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis. Former world lightweight
champion Ken Buchanan from Edinburgh is ranked fifth, one place higher
than Gorbalsborn flyweight Benny Lynch.

Platform souls: New plans for King’s Cross in London show the massive scale of the venture
The Guardian (London)
June 7, 2004
Platform souls: New plans for King’s Cross in London show the massive
scale of the venture. And the smart money – including that of New
York art tycoon Larry Gagosian – is already moving in. By Jonathan
Glancey
The hype surrounding the opening of the Gagosian Gallery in King’s
Cross, London, has been so great and the plaudits have been so
glittering that I expected to find something very special indeed.
Not, perhaps, a riposte to the Bilbao Guggenheim by Frank Gehry but a
landmark building; an artistic adventure.
The Gagosian Gallery proves to be a modest creation, housed in a
former garage in Britannia Street, a rats’ alley smelling of diesel
and urine, scuttling across the Metropolitan and Circle underground
lines as they rattle between Farringdon and King’s Cross-St Pancras.
Behind the gaunt facade, Larry Gagosian’s architects, Caruso St John,
best known for their New Art Gallery, in Walsall, which opened in
2000, have opened up bright, cavernous, concrete-floored, top-lit
white spaces. These are particularly refined white spaces; they have
something of a religious air about them, not least because on a
weekday afternoon this private gallery is as quiet as an abandoned
city church. A security guard sits like a piece of isolated artwork
by the locked door, while bright young things potter about at a vast
reception desk faced with important catalogues. A solitary, studious
looking fellow surveys the brown and white Cy Twombly abstracts,
which hang from the spotless white walls with a degree of respect
owed to icons and statues elsewhere.
None of this is a criticism of this new London art space, which is
one of the best of its kind since Charles Saatchi’s original gallery
in St John’s Wood, designed by the late Max Gordon. Caruso St John
are among our most thoughtful architects, as careful with the process
of building as they are with design. And, yet, for all its graceful
substance, the gallery has something of a temporary air about it.
Should the top end of the art market take a tumble between now and
the completion of the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras in 2007, it
would make a particularly fine restaurant, office or nightclub.
The area will certainly want these as its redevelopment gathers pace
over the next five years. Seedy for decades, King’s Cross is
fast-becoming a blue-chip investment for property developers. Quite
how the promethean building works promised here will pan out is
anyone’s guess. For every impressive new civil engineering
achievement, there will be routine chain stores; for every art
gallery, a fast-food joint. Expect, in time-honoured English
tradition, a mix of the sublime and the banal: the Gormenghast glory
of St Pancras raised to fresh, pinnacled heights as Eurostar trains
snake in and out on their three-mile-a-minute race to and from Paris
with its cafes, restaurants, shops and art galleries. Penny-plain
King’s Cross station stripped of 1970s tat. Both stations are
attended by millions of square feet of gleaming new offices, some
1,800 flats, dozens of shops, washed and brushed public spaces, three
new footbridges over the Regent’s Canal, restored historic buildings
and, so the developers say, more art galleries.
This leviathan plan, announced last week, for the 67-acre area north
of the Gagosian Gallery, has been prepared by a property consortium
comprising Argent St George, Exel, London and Continental Railways.
Allies and Morrison, immaculate Moderns, and Demetri Porphyrios, the
most convincing of the Prince of Wales’s school of classicists, have
been appointed architects in charge of a development that, in scale
at least, matches the heroic urban projects that shaped Victorian
London. The £2bn project will take at least 15 years to complete. It
may yet be rejected by the mayor of London, who will surely find its
tallest 19-storey towers too modest and its plan not sufficiently
dedicated to the concerns of big business. It may yet be called in
for public inquiry by the government, and either held up, heavily
edited or abandoned while lawyers rack up prodigious fees.
Whatever the process – the rise and fall of commercial and
professional reputations, the jaw-dropping fees, the performance
bonuses, pension top-ups, the gongs awarded and brown envelopes
exchanged – King’s Cross will surely be redeveloped on a titanic
scale within the next 10 and 20 years. The dodgy young men,
working-class street-walkers and middle-class kerb-crawlers will move
on, along with the purveyors of kebabs, tattoos and grubby mags.
Spick and span corporate offices, big-brand shops, chain cafes and
relentless street furniture interspersed with well-meant public art
will take their place.
Architects of the calibre of Allies and Morrison and Demetri
Porphyrios will do their best to raise the standards of St Pancras
but they cannot hope to control the quality of the tenants who will
flock here in coming years. There will be something like 30,000 new
jobs here, while millions of passengers travelling to and from London
and the Continent, and looking for diversion, will mill around King’s
Cross. A committed few might waft down New Britannia Street to pick
up a canvas by Cy Twombly or a pickled lamb by Damien Hirst.
Gagosian, however, ought to know what most people will want. This
sharp, silver-haired Armenian-American, nicknamed “Go-Go”, began
making money in Santa Monica in the 1970s. “I would buy prints for $
2-$ 3, put them in aluminium frames and sell them for $ 15,” says the
Donald Trump of the art world. If Gagosian likes art, he likes
nothing better than closing deals. He opened a small gallery behind
Regent Street a few years ago, also a conversion by Caruso St John,
before homing in on King’s Cross, which offers an optimum deal: a
place to show big, headline-stealing artworks – tens of tons of Serra
– in a handsome setting in the sort of grubby street that makes the
art world trill with excitement, while making a quiet future killing
on the property market.
Gagosian likes art, and knows that this, with all its high society
connections, brings kudos, glamour and outlandishly big bucks. Should
you happen to be a wheeler-dealer who builds a fashionable gallery
showing fashionable artists in one of the most fashionable
up-and-coming parts of London, how can you possibly go wrong?
Gagosian’s gung-ho, yet outwardly, highly refined, venture into the
London art world and King’s Cross is, perhaps, to be preferred to the
run-of-the-mill development that could take place here if we fail to
keep a sharp eye on the area and the hugely ambitious “masterplans”
dreamed up by one developer after the other over the past 15 years.
No one should doubt that the real artwork here is the arrival of the
high-speed Eurostar line. This, like the Midland Railway’s grand
Gothic entry into St Pancras some 140 years ago, will change the face
of the surrounding area, including Britannia Street, for ever.
guardian.co.uk/glancey
Graceful substance . . . the new Gagosian Gallery. Below, the
interior, with Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost. Below right, a model of the
planned King’s Cross redevelopment
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
June 7, 2004, Monday
ARMENIA: DEFENSE EXPENSES INCREASE
Armenia plans to increase the defense budget in 2005. This statement
was made by Serj Sargsyan, Defense Minister and Secretary of the
Security Council, after the end of a hearing in the parliament. This
year Armenia’s defense expenses amount to around $85 million. Serj
Sargsyan noted that the government intends to increase servicemen’s
money allowances and rearm the Armed Forces.
Source: Krasnaya Zvezda, June 3, 2004, p. 3
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AND NOW, HEALTH BOSSES PLAN TO SEEK DONATIONS!
by Debashis Konar
The Times of India
June 6, 2004
Finally, the state health system may just have the right survival kit
The state government’s health department is now all set to go on an
overdrive to collect donations to develop the health system in the
state. To make the process of collection of donations smooth, the
newly set up West Bengal State Health and Welfare Samiti (WBSHWS)
has decided to go for a change in its constitutional bylaws.
The WBSHWS has been formed clubbing all the disease control
programmes in the state for better monitoring of all the disease
control programmes. But it was unable to accept donations for not
having the status of an entity eligible to provide income tax rebate
to the donors. During WBSHWS’s first annual general meeting held
last Wednesday, the state health minister, Dr Surya Kanta Mishra,
ratified the requisite norms so that the Samiti can collect funds and
function in a better way. Dr Mishra said that the main objective of
the Samiti was to go for various disease control measure in a more
effective manner. “The funds from foreign donors couldn’t be properly
utilised due to certain norms. Now ratification of the norms will
enable the state health department to receive grants easily.”
A senior health department officer said that earlier the Samiti could
not accept grants of the Armenian Church and the Japanese Consulate.
The Armenian Church had offered to donate a sum of Rs 50 lakhs and the
Japanese Consulate had offered Rs 40 lakhs. According to him, the state
health department is planning to approach various international donors
for funds for various health projects. The ratification paves the way
for the Samiti to accept grant from individuals, various organisations,
and even from the foreign agencies and foreign governments. The health
department is already planning to accept grants from GTZ, a German
organisation, for improving the health infrastructure in the state. The
state health department had earlier taken a World Bank loan of Rs 700
crores for developing the hospitals in the state, which is going to
slow down in September. “So the state health minister is seeking for
alternate sources of funding to run various disease control projects,”
said the health department official.
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