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A sign for Artsakh Avenue — formerly a stretch of Maryland Avenue — was unveiled Tuesday, October 2, during a street naming ceremony hosted by the city of Glendale. The event drew officials from near and far: All five Glendale City Council members were present, in addition to state Sen. Anthony Portantino and Robert Avetisyan, a US representative for Artsakh, which is a contested republic between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In June, the City Council voted 4-0 to rename a two-block section of Maryland Avenue, between Wilson Avenue and Harvard Street, to Artsakh Avenue. During the decision-making process, Councilman Ara Najarian...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s threat to remove any mayors chosen in local elections next March deemed to be “contaminated by terrorism” is a rejection of democracy and an attempt to scare voters away from the main pro-Kurdish party, one of its members of parliament said. Turkish authorities stepped up pressure on the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) following the breakdown of a ceasefire with Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants in July 2015. The government says the HDP is, in effect, the political wing of the PKK. The crackdown gained momentum after a failed coup a year later that...

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – Syria’s Kurds “have been great partners,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday evening in Washington DC, as he addressed a conference of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA.)Pompeo affirmed that the Kurds would be party to negotiations over Syria’s political future.“We are now driving,” he said, stressing that last word, “to make sure that they have a seat at the table.”Pompeo is the most senior US official to affirm a long-term commitment to Syria’s Kurds.Previously, Amb. James Jeffrey, who was appointed Pompeo’s Representative for Syria Engagement in late August,...

This month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intimated that his country might consider leaving NATO. Meanwhile, on a visit to Moscow last week, Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu referred to Russia as a “strategic partner”—a first. This talk is empty. Erdogan may well be angry at Washington, but ultimately, Ankara is going to have to do whatever it takes to restore its ties with the West. Doing so might not be enough to pull the country out of its economic crisis, but Erdogan has few other options if he wants to avoid a potentially worse political meltdown: He depends too...

The more you dig into the this whole Robert Mueller witch hunt the more corruption you find with basically everyone involved. The guy who actually appointed Robert Mueller to conduct his tax payer funded witch hunt with Clinton lackeys is married to a Clinton attorney. The Russians couldn’t have set this up any better. I’m sure Lisa Barsoomian is a top notch attorney. She did get to where she is today because of name recognition. I mean if Billy BJ Clinton used her as an attorney, how could you argue her credentials? At least Rosenstein married well.

Evangelical leaders have responded to the New York Times' claim that the Trump administration is undermining its own priority of protecting religious freedom by emphasizing the policy priorities of evangelical Christians. On Saturday, The New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece titled "A Too-Narrow Vision of Religious Freedom." The piece essentially argues that although "the Trump administration embraces a laudable desire to expand religious tolerance" across the globe, it is the administration's "own intolerance toward some" that "undermines the message." For examples of intolerance, NYT mentions "Trump's disgraceful attempts to ban Muslims from some countries from entering the...

American evangelicals and human rights advocates are encouraging the United States to pressure Turkey to release American missionary Andrew Brunson, who faces ridiculous allegations of complicity in Kurdish terrorism. Are they right to do so, even if the price is estrangement with a key NATO member and harm to US regional interests? How should Christians in their political witness balance Christian causes versus the wider national good? The president, vice president and secretary of state have all denounced Turkey's imprisonment of Brunson. Economic sanctions have been levied against Turkish products, and personal sanctions have targeted two Turkish officials. Congress has...

Gunshots have been fired at the US embassy in Ankara but caused no casualties, Turkish and American officials said, amid escalating tensions between the two NATO allies.

The Trump White House has turned down an offer from the Turkish government to release imprisoned evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the White House rejected an offer from Ankara to release the imprisoned North Carolina native in exchange for the United States' forgiveness of billions of dollars of fines against one of Turkey's largest state lenders, citing an unnamed senior White House official. According to the official, Turkey offered to release Brunson if the U.S. drops its investigation in Halkbank (formerly known as Turkiye Halk Bankasi), which faces fines for violating U.S. sanctions against...

Looking at the Washington Post’s August 15 op-ed warning that “the U.S. can’t afford to lose Turkey,” a casual reader might glance at the writer’s bio to find sparkling credentials – a former U.S. diplomat with long years of experience working on Turkish policy at respected think tanks. Yet among the crucial details that writer, former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza, left off the bio was his employment by companies based in Turkey under the influence of the powerful ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). While this does not necessarily amount to a damning conflict of interest, Bryza’s article...

The 70+ year alliance between the US and Turkey has finally come to a dramatic end. But this turn of events was nowhere near unforeseen. In fact, I have been writing about the progression of this calamity for over a year. In April, I even wrote that Turkey was getting ready for economic warfare by repatriating its gold from the Federal Reserve. Well, now we are here. As the US rolled out economic sanctions against Turkey in recent days, the Turkish currency (lira) lost 35% of its value against the US dollar. This has caused inflation to skyrocket, which is...

In recent days, some choices of two countries bordering the Russian Federation have provoked very negative reactions in Moscow which sees its control over the "ex-Soviet" Russian world slipping. On July 28 in Armenia the former president Robert Kocharian was arrested (right in the picture), for many years the guarantor of loyalty to Russia, together with his close collaborator, General Jurij Khachaturov. The accusation is that he used violence against the demonstrations in 2008, after the elections that brought the Moscow candidate to the presidency. On August 2 it was the parliament of Moldova that displeased its former Soviet masters,...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow is "concerned" that Armenia's new leadership is making what he called politically motivated moves against former leaders who have been targeted in an anticorruption campaign. Lavrov's remarks on July 31 came after former Armenian President Robert Kocharian was charged with violently putting down protests against his successor in 2008. Kocharian, who was president from 1998 to 2008, was taken into custody on July 27 after being charged over the deadly dispersion of opposition protesters following the disputed 2008 presidential election. On the same day, Yuri Khachaturov, the Armenian head of the Russia-dominated Collective...

Former President Robert Kocharian has been taken into custody by Armenian authorities after being charged in connection with the deadly crackdown on opposition protests following the disputed presidential election in 2008. The case dates back to late February and early March 2008 in the wake of a disputed election to determine Kocharian’s successor. Kocharian’s ally, Serzh Sarkisian, was declared the winner, angering the opposition and setting off 10 days of nonstop protests that led to a crackdown on March 1 in which 10 people, including two police officers, were killed. Kocharian is accused of illegally ordering the violent dispersal of...

A Russian military official has apologized after Russian soldiers carried out unannounced exercises in the Armenian village of Panik on July 17. 30 Russian soldiers blocked off the roads in the village after which a column of military vehicles passed through accompanied by loud gunfire, as documented by local residents: “Everyone immediately ran out of their houses after these sounds, there were even children who fainted,” one local, Vardan Makeyan, told the news website Aravot. “It's insulting that no one warned us that there would be military exercises on the territory of our town.” The soldiers were from Russia's 102nd...

As a girl, my grandmother saw many members of her family killed when Turkey tried to destroy its population of Christian Armenians around the time of WWI. She emigrated to the US soon after, thinking she’d never see a free and independent Armenia. So it has always seemed like a miracle to me that, despite a genocide that wiped out 1.5 million Armenians — 80 percent of the population — they still managed to carve out their own turf in 1918, a small country bordering Turkey and Iran. Although the republic fell to Soviet invasion in 1920, it sprang back...

Muslim Cleric: Armenian Genocide A Lie Fabricated By The British, The Muslims Never Perpetrated A Racial Massacre.(Full title). Genocide denial. Criminal when non-Muslims do it, tolerated even venerated when Muslims do it. So it stands to reason that the Armenian genocide of millions of Christians by Muslims has not been designated as such by so many Western countries. ... Egyptian Cleric Sheikh Sharif Abadi: The Armenian Genocide Is A Lie Fabricated By The British, The Muslims Never Perpetrated A Racial Massacre ... Egyptian cleric Sheikh Sharif Abadi said that throughout history, the Muslims never fought peoples, never conquered in order...

On the surface, the show of people power in this former Soviet state has striking similarities to the ouster of pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, or Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2003. There are differences, however, argues Moscow-based political analyst Karine Gevorgyan. “In Armenia, in particular, this situation is not linked with being oriented either to the West or to the East, like it was in Ukraine, but with being tired of inefficient, counterproductive power in government,” Gevorgyan told VOA in an interview. No Moscow puppet Anahit Shirinyan of the policy institute Chatham House agrees and says...

Armenia has been in the grips of a mass public protest movement since early April, when opposition leader and member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan launched street demonstrations and strikes in cities all over the country against former president Serzh Sargsyan’s attempt to be named the next prime minister. But after Sargsyan stepped aside, the acting prime minister, Karen Karapetyan (a former chief executive of Gazprom’s fully owned Armenian subsidiary, who has long surrounded himself with support from Russian oligarchs), refused to accept the conditions of a peaceful transition of power to the opposition. To reinforce these counterrevolutionary measures, Samvel Karapetyan...

US coalition jets hit attacking forces believed to include Iranian-backed militias operating in Deir Ezzor area: Diplomat US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said they expelled Syrian troops who briefly took control of a string of villages in oil rich areas east of the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border on Sunday.SDF forces led by the Kurdish YPG militia said they launched a counter-attack against Syrian troops backed by Russian forces, adding they were driven "far away" from four villages they had seized earlier in the day."Our forces regained the initiative," they said in a statement.It did not say if the...