Are Santa Monica's Municipal Leaders Practicing Ethnic Discrimination?

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9/06/10 - Issue # 1223
By Appo Jabarian
Executive Publisher / Managing Editor
Santa Monica, California, may be one of the most beautiful cities on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. But soon it may earn a reputation for being ugly from within.

According to many residents and business persons in Los Angeles County under which has jurisdiction over Santa Monica, this popular tourist destination may have already established a record for being a California locality that practices discrimination on municipal government level.

In late July, the editor/administrator of www.haytoug.org wrote that in June, as part of an ordinance to overhaul the taxi system in Santa Monica, the City Hall staff recommended that only five taxicab companies be allowed to operate in the city. Out of these five companies, none is Armenian owned or operated and only two are locally-based in the city.

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Congress Should Investigate The State Department For Holding Back Aid to Artsakh

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
The State Department has acted negligently and possibly in contempt of Congress by withholding assistance that it had expressly allocated to Nagorno Karabagh (Artsakh) during the past 12 years.

The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) revealed last week that the State Department only spent about half of the amount allocated by Congress to Artsakh. From 1998 to 2010, Congress appropriated to Artsakh $61 million, not including an additional amount estimated at $10 million, allocated during 2000-2002. U.S. government documents obtained by ANCA reveal that the State Dept. spent only $36 million on humanitarian aid to Artsakh in those dozen years.

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Shame in The Sun

Another summer expires, and another vacation season starts to wind down, except for citizens of Armenia heading to Antalya, where the season continues well into October.

In 2009 some 50,000 such Armenians vacationed in Turkey, many of them in Antalya on the Mediterranean. In 2010 that embarrassing statistic soared by 30% for tourists headed to Antalya. Next year’s expected increase in the number of Turkey-bound Armenian tourists will be even more painful and incomprehensible to people who see the vacations as an insult to the Armenian nation.

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More Bad News for Baku

Semih Idiz
Hurriyet
Given the excitement over domestic politics in Turkey, and the concentration on developments concerning Iran and Israel abroad, few Turks have had a chance to consider the meaning of some of the steps Moscow has been taking in the southern Caucasus. One such development was the protocol Moscow signed recently with Armenia, extending the bilateral defense treaty the two countries signed in 1995 through 2044.

Experts tell us that while the defense alliance between Armenia and Moscow is nothing new, the protocols signed by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian have important new features. We are told, for example, that with the new arrangement Russia undertakes to guarantee Armenia's territorial integrity in its entirety, and not just its borders with Turkey and Iran, as before.

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Major Exhibition On Cultural Genocide in Turkish-Occupied Armenia

This exhibition showing how Armenian Churches and Monasteries were destroyed by the modern Turkish State in the years following the Genocide will take place in the main "Senedd" building of the National Assembly of Wales in Cardiff Bay between the 24th and the 30th September. The Turkish Ambassador in the UK will be invited, asked to account for the disappearance of "Turkish" Armenia from the maps of Turkey, and to discuss the return of the remains of these 2,000 plus religious buildings to the Armenian nation.

Annette Melikian