Author: Christine Harutyunian

– You can’t become a knowledge economy by going after your brightest minds.

So says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, speaking after Turkey’s highest education authority last week announced an investigation into more than 1,100 academics. They had signed a petition calling on the government to redouble efforts for peace in the southeast, where for months the military has been fighting an insurgency in largely Kurdish cities.

The petition was signed by international academics, including Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty members at Turkey’s top universities. By the end of the week, professors in Turkey were subject to police raids, several had lost their jobs and at least a dozen were detained, according to press reports.

That pressure will have a “chilling effect,” according to Stiglitz, who said he intended to raise the issue when meeting Turkish officials at the World Economic forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Photo: Reuters

 

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence in northern Kenya of what could be the earliest example of warfare between different human communities, the reports.

The 10,000-year-old remains of 27 people found at a remote site west of Lake Turkana show that they met violent deaths.

They were left to die there rather than being buried.

Many experts had thought conflict emerged only around 6,000 years ago after humans became more settled.

The archaeologists, who have been working on the site at Nataruk since 2012, discovered that the victims were clubbed or stabbed to death in a single event.

The dead included male and female adults, as well as children.

The evidence, published in the journal Nature, does not reveal exactly what happened but it was definitely the result of “some sort of conflict”, according to Cambridge University Professor Robert Foley.

On 11 January, Armenia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Zohrab Mnatsakanyan was elected President of the Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP), UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Office for Project Service (UNOPS), the Organizations’ governing body, for a one-year term.

The Executive Board is made up of representatives of Member States and is mandated by the UN General Assembly to provide inter-governmental support to and overall supervision of the activities of UNDP, UNFPA and UNOPS. The Board meets three times a year ensuring that the three Agencies remain responsive to the evolving needs of programme countries.

“2016 will be a pivotal time for our Board and sister-agencies in light of the recent adoption of the new set of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The year will also be critical in view of the mid-term review of the strategic plans for 2014-2017, as well as the upcoming discussions of the new cycle of Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review, which remains the main political mechanism for member states to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and impact of the UN development system’s support to national development efforts”, – stated Ambassador Mnatsakanyan in his acceptance remarks.

Information: Armenia is a member of the Executive Board of the UNDP, UNFPA and UNOPS since 2014. In June 2015, the Board approved the UNDP’s and UNFPA’s country programme documents for Armenia for the period of 2016-2020.

The third issue of the “Gor” magazine in Hamshen Armenian has been published in Turkey, reports, quoting a post on the magazine’s Facebook page.

According to the source, the third issue includes articles on linguistic research on the Hamshen dialect, a number of anecdotes, poems and narratives depicting the Hamshen culture.

Last night President Serzh Sargsyan together with the officials responsible for the sport area participated at the award ceremony for the representatives of Armenia’s sport community.

At the traditional meeting held on the eve of the holidays, the President congratulated the representatives of the sport area of the Republic on the occasion of New Year and Holly Christmas, wished them excellent health, new success and achievements in the area of sport and in personal life. Serzh Sargsyan congratulated also athletes who received awards.

Speaking about year 2015, which was full of events and success, the President of Armenia stressed that 2015 has also been important as the pre-Olympic year and wished that at the Olympic Games of 2016 in Rio de Janeiro the Armenian athletes win gold medals and make our people proud.

The NKR Ministry of Defense reports a decrease in the number of ceasefire violations by the Azerbaijani side at the line of contact with the Karabakh forces.

The rival used mostly artillery weapons of different caliber as it fired about 1,000 shots in the direction of the Armenian positions.

The front divisions of the NKR Defense Army maintained the relative calmness at the frontline and confidently fulfilled their military task.

Valery Permyakov, Russian soldier charged with murdering a family Gyumri, stood befor the Armenian court today.

Permyakov was provided an interpreter and advocate. The sitting was attended by relatives of the Avetisyan family.

On January 12, 2014 private of the Russian Military Base #102 in Gyumri Valery Permyakov killed seven members of the Avetisyan family, after which he tried to illegally cross the Armenian state border.

In August Permyakov was already tried by Russia’s military court and sentenced to 10 years in prison on desertion and arms and ammunition stealing charges.

The next sitting in the case will be held on January 18.

Photo: AFP

 

Saudi Arabia has said 34 mainly Muslim nations have joined a new military alliance to fight terrorism, the BBC reports.

A joint operations centre is to be established in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, state media reported.

Countries from Asia, Africa and the Arab world are involved in the alliance but Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival Iran is not.

It comes amid international pressure for Gulf Arab states to do more in the fight against so-called Islamic State.

Saudi Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman said the new alliance would co-ordinate efforts against extremists in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan.

Neither Iraq nor Syria, whose governments are close to Shia-ruled Iran, are in the coalition, nor is Afghanistan.

Photo: AP

 

Egyptian investigators say they have so far found no proof that terrorism caused a Russian jet to crash in the Sinai in October, killing 224 people, the BBC reports.

The plane came down en route to Russia from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

A group linked to so-called Islamic State (IS) said it bombed the plane. Nearly all the victims were Russians.

Russia has said a bomb brought down the Metrojet Airbus, after finding what it said were “traces of foreign explosives” on the debris.

It has vowed to “find and punish” the perpetrators. In response to Monday’s findings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov re-iterated that “our experts concluded this was a terrorist attack”.

A court in Azerbaijan on Wednesday ordered the country’s top rights campaigner Leyla Yunus to be released from prison, citing her deteriorating health, Agence France-Presse reports.

The judge at the appeals court in the capital Baku gave Yunus a suspended sentence of five years after throwing out the initial eight-and-a-half year jail term, an AFP reporter in the courtroom said.

Yunus, 59, suffers from a number of ailments including hepatitis C and diabetes.

The head of the Institute for Peace and Democracy, one of the leading rights groups in the tightly-controlled country, was jailed in August on charges that include fraud and tax evasion.

Her husband Arif Yunus, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on similar charges, was released in November also because of his poor health.

The Yunus couple and their supporters have rejected the charges as trumped-up and politically motivated.

Leyla Yunus complained in September that she had been severely beaten in custody by prison guards.

International rights groups have slammed the prosecution of the Yunus couple as an attempt by Azerbaijan’s iron-fisted authorities to prevent them from continuing their work.

Amnesty International had demanded the “immediate release” of the couple, describing them as “prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for their legitimate human rights work and criticism of the government”.

Arrested last year on suspicion of spying for arch-foe Armenia, the pair also face treason charges in a separate case.

Leyla Yunus has won several international awards for her work, and she has teamed up with Armenian activists to urge reconciliation between the two countries, locked in a decades-long conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.