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Of course Yerevan has to REJECT Turkish role in Karabakh Talks...This is an unprecedented!...




RFE/RL Report
Yerevan Again Rejects Turkish Role In Karabakh Talks
August 11, 2016
Tatevik Sargsian
Armenia has again spoken out against Turkey's involvement in
international efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, citing
Ankara's full and unconditional support for Azerbaijan.

"We continue to believe that Turkey has nothing to do in the
Nagorno-Karabakh settlement process," the Armenian Foreign Ministry
spokesman, Tigran Balayan, said late on Wednesday.

"The only assistance which Turkey can provide, given its completely
pro-Azerbaijani position, is to stay away from the process as much as
possible," he said in written comments to News.am.

Balayan was reacting to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's
remark earlier on Wednesday that Ankara stands ready to contribute to
a Karabakh settlement, including through joint efforts with Russia and
Azerbaijan.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called for a trilateral
cooperation framework comprising Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan after
holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint
Petersburg on Tuesday. He said the three states should jointly deal
with regional issues and the Karabakh conflict in particular.

Turkish media also quoted Erdogan as speaking of progress made in the
Karabakh peace process of late "Mr. Putin is dealing with this issue,"
he said, commenting on his talks with the Russian leader that
highlighted an ongoing thaw in Russian-Turkish relations.

Those relations had been strained since last November's downing by a
Turkish fighter jet of a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish
border.

Successive Armenian governments have said that Turkey cannot act as a
mediator in the Karabakh dispute because of its staunchly
pro-Azerbaijani stance.

Erdogan underlined that policy when he pledged to back Baku "to the
end" immediately after the start of an Azerbaijani offensive in
Karabakh in early April.

Russia, which helped to stop the fighting on April 5, denounced at the
time "one-sided" statements made by Erdogan and other Turkish
leaders. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suggested that the
"Turkish factor" might have also been behind the escalation of the
Karabakh conflict. Ankara rejected the Russian criticism. 


Anadolu Agency, Turkey
Aug 10 2016
Turkey: 5 remanded over Armenian journalist murder 
Founder of Turkish-Armenian weekly, Hrant Dink was killed in Istanbul in 2007 

Five out of eight gendarmes detained on Wednesday over the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink were remanded in custody, a judicial source said. 

They have been charged with being members of a terrorist organization and "complicity in premeditated murder". 

Three other gendarmes were released under judicial restrictions, the source said on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media. 

Hrant Dink was killed in broad daylight in front of his office in Istanbul on Jan. 19, 2007. He was one of the founders of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly, Agos, and was considered one of the most prominent Armenian voices in Turkey. 

His death sparked widespread protests and led to speculation about the involvement of far-right groups and claims of a cover-up. 

On April 20, 2007, Istanbul public prosecutors prepared an indictment of more than 18 suspects, including an individual named Ogun Samast, who was later convicted of the killing. 

Samast, from Trabzon on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, was jailed for 23 years in 2011. He was aged 17 at the time of the killing and claimed he had killed Dink for "insulting Turkishness". 

The Constitutional Court ruled in July 2014 that the case was marred by an "ineffective investigation". 

Last year, another case was launched regarding alleged police negligence in the investigation. Former senior officers have been arrested and in December an indictment against 26 suspects on charges of "establishing an armed organization" and "neglecting their duties" was issued. 


Human Rights Watch
Aug 9 2016
Armenia Sacks Yerevan Police Chief
Authorities Act After Protestors Are Violently Attacked By Police
by Giorgi Gogia, South Caucasus Director, Europe and Central Asia Division
The police chief of Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city, was sacked this
week. The sudden dismissal of Ashot Karapetyan was due to his “failing
to prevent violent attacks on protesters and journalists” during
protests in late July, Armenian authorities announced. The same day,
authorities also reprimanded 13 other officers, and just three days
earlier, another five officers were suspended.

The suspension and even sacking of police officers, especially such
senior figures, was dramatic and could be a sign that there will be
accountability for what happened on July 29, when police violently
dispersed a crowd of protesters. The protest was one of the almost
nightly, largely peaceful, gatherings that had taken place in Yerevan
starting on July 17, when armed gunmen seized a police station in
Yerevan, killing one policeman and taking several other police
hostages.

My colleague and I arrived in Yerevan just hours after the July 29
protest was violently broken up. We interviewed people who described
in great detail how police had fired stun grenades directly into
peaceful crowds, causing horrible injuries including first- and
second-degree burns and blast injuries. At least 60 people received
treatment in hospitals that night. We also documented how police
assaulted journalists reporting on the demonstrations. Multiple
witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch identified Karapetyan as
the police officer who had personally led the operation on the ground.

We also documented how Armenian authorities arbitrarily detained
dozens of protesters and beat many of them, some severely. Officials
also pressed unjustified criminal charges against at least 44 protest
leaders and participants, and denied many of them access to a lawyer
or the right to make a phone call.

Four days after arriving in Armenia, my colleague and I presented our
findings to Armenia’s Special Investigative Service (SIS), the body in
charge of investigating crimes committed by law enforcement agents.
Although SIS had initiated several criminal investigations with
limited scopes, we were encouraged by its decision later that day to
look at a wider range of possible violations committed by police.

As we interviewed victims last week, many spoke of their overwhelming
mistrust of the Armenian authorities, largely because of impunity for
past police abuse. The government now has a chance to rectify that
record and start the urgent task of rebuilding the public’s trust.
It’s taken some important first steps. Now it should ensure swift and
thorough investigations to establish individual accountability for
unjustified police violence throughout the protests, and train police
properly in crowd control. This may help ensure that the bloody events
of July 29 are never repeated. 
arka.am About 10,000 young men and girls enroll in Armenian universities

YEREVAN, August 11. /ARKA/. According to the final results of
university admission exams, 9,520 school-leavers have been enrolled in
state-owned universities this year, the local daily ‘Haykakan
Zhamanak’ (Armenian Time) says, citing the data provided by the
ministry of education and science.

Some 1,307 students, who have gained the highest scores, will not pay
tuition fees, the rest - 8,120 students - will have to pay for their
education.

According to the newspaper, overall 13,941 young men and girls had
high school graduation exams. Of them 1,530 failed to overcome the
minimum threshold. Last year the figure was 1, 826 thousand students.


arka.am
Foreigners not obliged to apply for work permit in Armenia
YEREVAN, August 11. The Armenian government has suspended
today a provision of the law that obliges foreign nationals to apply
for a work permit in Armenia. According to labor and social affairs
minister Artem Asatryan, the provision in question will  be
ineffective until  January 1, 2018.

"Today we have 5,179 foreign citizens, predominantly Armenians by
nationality, working in the country,  employed in areas such as
science, education, technology and communications, processing
industry, trade and health care",  said Asatryan.

The minister said although the Armenian law regulating this issue is
relatively friendly, it, nonetheless, creates certain difficulties for
employers, including loss of time and additional financial expenses
(15 days for formalization of documents and 25 thousand drams paid as
duty for each work permit).

"Without setting specific quotas it is difficult to regulate this
sector. However, there is no such a need yet as the number of foreign
workers in the country is not large. This is why after studying the
issue, we propose to temporarily suspend the provision of the law",
Asatryan said. 


Yahoo! Finance
Aug 10 2016
This woman built a $65 million tech company thanks to Google
Annie Safoian SADA Systems
In 1987, a 32-year-old Annie Safoian moved to Los Angeles from Armenia with her husband, Hovig, and their 9-year-old son, Tony. 

Today and she and her family run an LA tech company called SADA Systems , a thriving Google and Microsoft reseller expected to do $65 million in revenue this year, she tells us. 

And she has been fending off a constant stream of offers to acquire the company, for a healthy multiple over revenues. She wouldn't tell us how much money she's been offered, but given the market, offers have likely ranged from hundreds of millions of dollars to as high as half a billion, we understand. 

But she likes her job and her company, worries a sale wouldn't be good for employees, and simply doesn't care that much about the loot. 

"We have discussed selling within the family. Everybody wants to buy us. We are in our 60’s, our son is 38 years old. He’s the CEO, my husband is CTO. We've been all together here and working all these years," she says. "If we sell this company and get more money in our bank account, we would still have to do something. My son is very young. We are still so passionate about this technology. It's never boring, but so exciting every single day. Why would I sell?" 

Back in 1987, when the Safoians first moved to America, she couldn't have predicted her success. Her English was mediocre, she had no technical training and she wasn't exactly sure what she was going to do for a living. But she knew she loved her new home country and became a citizen right away. 

She took some accounting classes, got a job as a payroll coordinator, which she disliked, yet might have toiled away at forever if the company hadn't laid her off. So she jumped into graphic designed, something she loved, and learned how to build web pages. Her husband found work as a programmer. 

Slowly, her hard-work ethic had her customers asking her to do more and more tech jobs. One of them asked her to modify their accounting software. She enlisted her husband's help for that and they founded a tech company, SADA Systems, which then went on to manage computers and networks for small businesses, doing small custom apps for customers along the way. 'Hello, this is Google calling' 


And then, out of the blue, Google called. 

"The lucky year was 2007 when Google came to us and needed some help for their Google Apps. We were one of their launch partners on Work," she says, referring to Google's plan to sell Google Apps to more businesses. 

Google also wanted SADA to build a tool that would let its customers easily transfer their email and documents into the Google Apps cloud, she says. SADA agreed to work on that, for no compensation, in exchange for becoming a major, early partner authorized to sell Apps. 

"We had never had done what they were asking us to do. But we told them we could do it, and worked day and night and delivered it on time," Safoian remembers. 

To this day, Safoian doesn't fully know how Google found SADA, except through word-of-mouth referrals when it was looking for a company to help it sell Apps for Work in LA. 

Remember, in 2007, Microsoft's Office ruled, businesses distrusted putting their documents in the cloud, and Google had no experience selling its wares to businesses. It needed to start with smaller but established resellers that could help it get a foothold. Enter Microsoft 

Business took off for SADA after it began working with Google Apps. Microsoft took notice and convinced SADA to become a reseller for its cloud product, Office 365, too, which Safoian agreed to do. Both companies wanted SADA to help them steal customers away from each other, but she absolutely refused, she says.