Having Turkey mediate peace talks between Israel and Syria was a mistake that harmed relations between Ankara and Israel, a senior Israeli official said.

The Nagorno-Karabakh peace process will be successful only with the participation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in the negotiations, said President Serzh Sarkisian Tuesday during a meeting with a visiting Karabakh parliamentary delegation.

Iran is ready to serve a mediating role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, its foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki said Tuesday in Tehran after talks with his Azeri counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov.

Only days after the EU foreign ministers’ warning over Ankara’s ‘failure’ to open its ports to shipping from Greek Cyprus, Greece’s Deputy Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas says although Turkey has a place in the bloc, it is not the Turkey of today.

Two people were shot dead and several were wounded Tuesday in southeastern Turkey when a shopkeeper fired on demonstrators protesting a court ban on the country’s main Kurdish party, a local official said.

The Community.com, a social network for peace and human rights, featuring Desmond Tutu, President José Ramos-Horta of East Timor and other Nobel Peace Prize winners, joined forces with Amnesty International, the UN Foundation, CARE, the One Campaign and twelve other human rights and peace building organizations to raise awareness for the Declaration of Human Rights Campaign with a screening on December 9 of Clint Eastwood’s new film, “INVICTUS.”

Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet-era rights defender Andrei Sakharov and an outspoken rights campaigner in her own right, has lamented what she says is a decline in the invocation of her late husband’s name and ideals, RFE/RL’s Russian Service reports.

sassounianIn his letter of November 20 to Armenian American organizations, Pres. Obama once again played shameful word games with the term genocide. At this point, one has to be incredibly naïve to believe that he is going to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide during the rest of his term in office.

Finally it snowed! And finally, I used freshly split logs to start a long-awaited fire with dried kindling in the fireplace. It was the seventh of the month, and it had not yet snowed until now. That was a change from yesteryears, when Thanksgiving came in the middle of snowstorms stranding air and land travelers. The Greens attribute all this change to global warming, which, if persists, will melt the Antarctic snow and raise the sea levels to surpass that of the Great Flood, which prompted Noah to build his arc. Waves and wind had directed the arc towards Armenia, and when the waters receded, the arc had settled on our very own Mount Ararat—unlike the British Navy, which couldn’t (rather wouldn’t) climb our mountain as Gostan Zarian had portrayed in his novel Nave Lerran Vrah (The Ship on the Mountain).

The event’s keynote speaker, Armenian National Committee of America Chairman Ken Hachikian,outlined the threats facing the Armenian nation as a result of the Armenia-Turkey protocols and the imperative for Armenian unity in opposition of these dangerous documents.

Youth organizations in Armenia released an open statement on Friday condemning Azerbaijan’s recent threats to use force against Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The letter, read at a press conference at the Yerablur memorial complex, is open for all youth, students and political organizations to join, the organizers said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned President Serzh Sarkisian late Thursday just hours after he threatened to annul Armenia’s fence-mending agreements with Turkey if Ankara fails to unconditionally implement them, it emerged on Friday.

International mediators visited Baku on Friday to start preparations for more talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents which they hope will lead to a framework peace accord on Nagorno-Karabakh next year.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court late Friday delivered a landmark ruling, banning the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) for alleged links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).