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A number of items have been stolen from St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian church in Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, Turkey.
The thieves managed to steal several objects from the church. However, they were forced to run away after being spotted taking out a massive icon and a cross out of the church, according to Ermenihaber.am.
Leaving the icon and the cross outside the church, the thieves ran away taking a number of stolen objects with them.
The prove is under way.
A round of UN-brokered peace talks between the rival leaders on divided Cyprus broke up in acrimony on Thursday, February 16 over a 1950 referendum, the Turkish Cypriot leader said, according to AFP.
Tensions have soared over the approval by the Greek Cypriot parliament in the south of the divided island for schools to mark the 1950 referendum on Enosis, or union with Greece.
Mustafa Akinci said that when the issue came up of cancelling the decision to mark the 1950 referendum, his Greek Cypriot counterpart Nicos Anastasiades said there “was nothing else to say, slammed the door and left.”
“At that point there was nothing more to do as this meeting needs to be conducted in an atmosphere of respect so we also left the meeting,” he told reporters.
But Anastasiades expressed confusion over the situation.
Akinci’s “withdrawal was unwarranted and without cause or reason”, he said on television, adding that UN envoy Espen Barth Eide, chairing the meeting, was also “unaware of what happened”.
The 1950 referendum — before Cyprus won independence from colonial ruler Britain — overwhelmingly approved Enosis but had no legal value.
The schools legislation, sponsored by the far-right ELAM party, essentially calls for secondary school pupils to mark the referendum anniversary by learning about the event and reading leaflets dedicated to understanding the Enosis cause.
In a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday, Akinci warned that the move would cause “great damage” to the peace process.
The two sides had in recent weeks been engaged in fragile peace talks that observers have seen as the best chance in years to reunify the island.
In January, the UN hosted talks in Geneva bringing both sides together for the first time with the three “guarantor powers” of Britain, Greece and Turkey.
Much of the progress until now has been based on the strong personal rapport between Anastasiades and Akinci, leader of the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus who was born in Limassol which is now in the south.
“The Greek (Cypriot) leader has acted from time to time hotheadedly,” said Akinci.
“In the past we tolerated it until the last drop. It was not possible to tolerate this now,” he added. “This is a way to behave in a meeting.”
The UN envoy was due to make a statement later in the day.
The eastern Mediterranean island has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the northern third in response to an Athens-inspired coup seeking Enosis.
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For the eighth and final time, President Obama this year will break his unambiguous 2008 campaign promise to declare that the mass killings of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915 and 1916 amounted to “genocide,” a leading Armenian-American activist told Yahoo News on Thursday.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, at least 664,000 and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Armenians “died in massacres, in individual killings, or as a consequence of systematic ill-treatment, exposure, starvation and disease.”
But officially designating the Ottoman Turks’ actions as “genocide” would have deeply angered Turkey, a NATO ally and a pivotal player in the coalition Obama has assembled to wage war on the Islamic State in neighboring Syria. Turkish governments have sharply disputed the figures of Armenian dead and categorically rejected the “genocide” label.
Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, told Yahoo News shortly after a briefing from Obama aides at the White House that the president would once again stop short of using the term “genocide” in his annual statement about the tragedy.
“We took from today’s meeting at the White House that the president will end his tenure in office as he began it, caving in to Turkish pressure and betraying his own promise to properly recognize the Armenian genocide,” Hamparian said by telephone.
Hamparian told Yahoo that Obama’s annual statement, usually issued on April 24, was not finished yet but that the officials were very clear that it would not deviate from past years in which he has shunned the term “genocide.” White House officials declined to comment.
Hamparian said this year’s decision carried a special sting because the Obama administration recently applied the “genocide” label to atrocities carried out by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
“There’s absolutely no excuse” to withhold the same designation in the Armenian case, he said.
As a senator, Obama supported but did not co-sponsor a 2007 resolution calling for the use of the term “genocide” when discussing the Armenian tragedy. (Hillary Clinton, then a senator, co-sponsored the measure. As secretary of state, however, she did not use the term. Aides to her presidential campaign did not return emails seeking her current position.)
And when he was running for the presidency in 2008, Obama could hardly have been clearer.
“My firmly held conviction [is] that the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence,” he said in a statement. “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.”
Once in office, however, Obama’s grip on that conviction apparently loosened, and he joined other presidents like George W. Bush in saying one thing during the campaign and another from the Oval Office.
In 2015, the 100th anniversary of the tragic events, Obama’s statement referred to “Meds Yeghern,” Armenian for “the great calamity.” He also included a reference to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” during World War II.
Pope Francis referred to the same events as “the first genocide of the 20th century.” In 1981, then president Ronald Reagan referred to “the genocide of the Armenians.”
Forty-three U.S. states have recognized the Armenian genocide. Twenty-four countries and the European Parliament have done so as well.
(rferl) Scores of people, including opposition activists, were detained in Azerbaijan on January 13 amid countrywide protests over worsening economic conditions in the oil-rich Caucasus state.
Protesters rallied in the districts of Fizuli, Aqsu, Aqcabardi, Siyazan, and Lankaran to voice their anger over price hikes on staples such as flour and bread.
Most of the arrests were made in the district of Siyazan, where troops were sent in. Overall, 55 people were detained there “to protect citizens’ constitutional rights and ensure public safety,” the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General’s Office said in a joint statement.
The statement added that those detained held “illegal marches” in the city of Siyazan on both January 12 and 13.
“Unlawful actions inflicted various physical injuries on police officers and damaged two of the police vehicles,” the statement said.
Security forces used tear gas against stone-throwing protesters in Siyazan and several other towns, where an undisclosed number of detentions were reported.
The official statement acknowledged that protests took place in various locations and blamed the opposition Popular Front (AXCP) and Musavat parties for organizing them.
The central authorities’ account was contradicted by at least one local official. Rasim Novruzov, a deputy head of the district administration in Aqsu, said the events in his district could not be described as protests.
Novruzov added that local authorities had spoken to the demonstrators and agreed to address high flour prices.
However, reports indicated that several opposition activists were detained amid the unrest.
In Lankaran, local AXCP chief Nazim Hasanli was detained together with the chairman of the local branch of the opposition Musavat party, Iman Aliyev.
Hasanli and Aliyev were each sentenced to one month in jail for taking part in an unsanctioned protest. Both pleaded innocent, saying they had nothing to do with the rallies.
Meanwhile, AXCP youth activist Turan Ibrahim was detained in Baku. He was arrested near his home in the capital late on January 13, according to his brother, Togrul Ibrahim, who said at least seven police officers took him away as he was returning from work.
Ibrahim was taken to the Nariman district police department in Baku and charged with resisting arrest, his brother said.
Turan Ibrahim’s father, Mammad Ibrahim, is an adviser to the AXCP chairman who has been in custody since late September on hooliganism charges. The elder Ibrahim rejects the charges as politically motivated.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s government has faced increasing criticism about rights abuses. Several journalists and rights activists have been jailed over the past year on charges such as hooliganism, tax evasion, and illegal business activities.
Rights groups say the charges are often trumped up, and leveled in retaliation for opposition activities and criticism of senior government officials. Azerbaijani officials have denied the allegations.
Manat In Free Fall
The unrest follows a steep drop in the value of the national currency, the manat, against the U.S. dollar. Falling oil revenues, which make up the vast majority of Azerbaijan’s exports, have also rocked the economy amid a decline in global oil prices.
Azerbaijani citizens have been hard-hit by rising inflation, unemployment, and costs of staple goods. Earlier this month, a 63-year-old maintenance man set himself alight in front of his workplace, reportedly after complaining to colleagues of bank loans he could not repay.
In the latest sign of economic trouble, Azerbaijan’s Central Bank on January 14 banned independent currency-exchange outlets from operating. Central Bank officials said only banks would be allowed to exchange foreign currency.
The Central Bank in December listed “the continuing devaluation of partner countries’ currencies” among the factors contributing to the ailing economy.
The manat has tumbled by more than 42 percent against the dollar on the black market since the Central Bank withdrew support for the currency last month after exhausting more than half its foreign currency reserves in an attempt to prop up the manat against falling oil prices. Azerbaijan’s currency has fallen 33 percent on the official market.
The bank said it was forced to loosen the currency regime to “preserve hard-currency reserves … and ensure the national economy’s competitiveness on the international arena.”
The decision was also prompted by the continued depletion of a critical source of finance for the state budget, the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ). Reserves in the fund, established in 1999 at the start of the start of the country’s oil and gas boom, have dipped by more than 9 percent since the beginning of the year.
When oil prices fell, the government had used money from the fund to prop up the Central Bank’s plummeting foreign reserves, leaving it with $33.6 billion as of December 1.
In related news, Baku has since ordered a cut in the price of flour, which had been rising rapidly thanks to the manat’s collapse.
In a statement on January 14, the Economy Ministry said it was waiving value added tax on the import of wheat and the production and sale of flour and bread from January 15.
It said that would allow a reduction in the wholesale price for flour, and listed the prices at which bread should now be sold.
“Anyone who sells flour and bread at higher prices will be held to account in the most serious way,” the statement said.
“This decision has been taken on the instructions of President Ilham Aliyev to strengthen the social protection the population, in particular poor families, from the change in the rate of the manat.”