by AP -- President Biden on Saturday became the first U.S. president to formally recognize the systematic deportation and massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as a genocide -- something the successive White Houses have avoided out of concern for damaging relations with Turkey. "Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring," Biden said in a statement marking Armenian Remembrance Day. An estimated 2 million Armenians were deported and 1.5 million killed between 1915 and 1925 in what has become known as Meds Yeghern. "Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination," Biden said. "We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms."

by thenationalnews.com — Gareth Browne — A shipment of more than 5.3 million amphetamine pills hidden inside pomegranates seized by Saudi Arabia …

By AFP -- A Lebanon-made electric car has made its debut, the first time the Mediterranean country has manufactured an automobile, despite struggling amid a dire economic crisis with frequent power cuts. The red sports car – named “Quds Rise”, using the Arabic name of Jerusalem – is the project of Lebanese-born Palestinian businessman Jihad Mohammad. It’s the “first automobile to be made locally,” Mohammad told reporters on Saturday, at the unveiling in a parking lot south of Beirut. It was built in Lebanon “from start to finish”, he said of the prototype, emblazoned at the front with a golden logo of the Dome of the Rock, the shrine in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest site.

The car is to cost $30,000. Production of up to 10,000 vehicles is hoped to start later this year in Lebanon, with cars to hit the market in a year’s time, said Mohammad, the director of Lebanon-based firm EV Electra. He says his long-term goal is to compete on the international market for hybrid and electric cars, as well as to make sales in Lebanon. But the unveiling comes as Lebanon struggles amid its worst economic crisis in decades, and imported car sales are at a record low, in part due to capital controls and drastic devaluation on the black market.

اليوم وبعد ١٠٦ سنوات تعترف الولايات المتحدة بالابادة الارمنية. هل نعتبر ونطالب جميعنا باستعادة سيادة الدولة حتى لا ننتظر عشرات السنين؟ باسم …