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Labels: Announcement

Azercell Telecom JV and London-based Reuters Foundation are pleased to announce a special training programme for journalists. The training is organised in framework of Azercell’s new policy of promoting quality journalism in Azerbaijan.

Famous former Reuters correspondents Oliver Wates and Anatoly Verbin from Reuters Foundation will conduct a practical seminar in techniques of writing business and financial news for journalists from Azerbaijan, with a special focus on telecommunications. The course is open to active mid-career journalists with at least two years of practical experience in newspaper, radio, television, and magazine or internet journalism.

As well as basic news-writing techniques, the workshop will focus on:

Company results, sifting through the figures
Interest Rates, understanding the economic connections
Legal Dangers, reporting safely and accurately on sensitive subjects
Small Business, how to tell interesting stories
Big Business, how to separate fact from fiction
Numbers, how to present them in a user-friendly manner
The course will be practical and will be conducted in Azeri and Russian.

Eligible participants must:

be practising journalists specialising in economics and telecommunication;
be working for national broadcast, print or electronic periodical media;
have minimum 2 years of work experience in analysing and reporting business and economics;
be available for the below-mentioned training course for an extended period of time.
The training will be held in Baku on 18-22 June 2007. 15 participants will be selected to take part in the training.

For further information please contact:

Rufat Abbasov

Press-secretary

Azercell Telecom JV

Email: ssarufat@azercell.com

Labels: Announcement

Labels: entertainment

Iran-Azerbaijan-Ahmadinejad
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Thursday that Iran is ready to have growing ties and cooperation with Azerbaijan as there are extensive potential available for the purpose.

Ahmadinejad told Azeri foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov that Iran does not consider any limit for sharing its valuable experience with the republic of Azerbaijan.

He said regional states should expand mutual cooperation in line with interests of their nations.

"Progress and strength of any country in the region would benefit its and other regional nations," he added.

Mammadyarov said for his part Baku wants to use Iran's precious experience in different fields, including energy, culture and power plant construction as well as widening the north-south corridor.

IRNA

Labels: world news

Osama bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said FBI documents released Wednesday.

The papers, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, were made public by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based group that investigates government corruption.

One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 airplane that departed Los Angeles International Airport on September 19, 2001, and was said to have carried Saudi nationals out of the United States.

"The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden," according to the document, which was among 224 pages posted online.

The flight made stops in Orlando, Florida; Washington, DC; and Boston, Massachusetts and eventually left its passengers in Paris the following day.

In all, the documents detail six flights between September 14 and September 24 that evacuated Saudi nationals and bin Laden family members, Judicial Watch said in a statement.

"Incredibly, not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value," Judicial Watch said.

"These documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI's investigation of the Saudi flights.

"For example, on one document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 20 of 23 passengers on the Ryan International Airlines flight ... on another document the FBI claims to have interviewed 15 to 22 passengers on the same flight."

Asked about the documents' assertion that either bin Laden or the Saudi royals ordered the flight, an FBI spokesman said the information was inaccurate.

"There is no new information here. Osama bin Laden did not charter a flight out of the US," FBI special agent Richard Kolko said.

"This is just an inflammatory headline by Judicial Watch to catch people's attention. This was thoroughly investigated by the FBI."

Kolko pointed to the 9-11 Commission Report, which was the book-length result of an official probe into the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

"No political intervention was found. And most important, the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals that left on chartered flights. This is all available in the report," Kolko said.

On the issue of flights of Saudi nationals leaving the United States, the 9-11 report said: "We found no evidence of political intervention" to facilitate the departure of Saudi nationals.

The commission also said: "Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights."

Meredith Diliberto, an attorney with Judicial Watch, said that her group had seen a first version of the documents in 2005, although the FBI had heavily redacted the texts to black out names, including all references to bin Laden.

Nevertheless, unedited footnotes in the texts allowed lawyers to determine that bin Laden's name had been redacted. They pressed the issue in court and in November 2006, the FBI was ordered to re-release the documents.

Diliberto said mention that "either" bin Laden or Saudi royals had chartered the flight "really threw us for a loop."

"When you combine that with some of the family members not being interviewed, we found it very disturbing."

Labels: world news

Paris Hilton says in an interview from jail she's a changed woman who now appreciates "things I took for granted" and plans to use her fame "in a good way."

"I'm so much more grateful for everything that I have, even just to have a pillow at night or food," Hilton told E! News's Ryan Seacrest in a phone conversation from Century Regional Correctional Facility.

Hilton, who is scheduled to be released next week, says she plans to use her celebrity for good – and doesn't want to be the object of ridicule anymore.

"You know my gratitude has gone up so much and I just realize that the media used me to make fun of and be mean about it," she tells Seacrest in the interview for Thursday's show. "Frankly [I'm] sick of it and I want to use my fame in a good way."

Of her life behind bars, Hilton, who was jailed for violating probation for driving with a suspended license, says it's been difficult being kept from her family. "I am behind glass and I want to give my dad a big hug and they won't even let me do that."

She also insists that she is not receiving any special treatment in jail. "That's how the rules are, you have to be behind glass," she said. "I'm not a criminal, I'm not dangerous, so it makes me feel like that. It's hard but I'm stronger everyday."

As for the future, Hilton says: "I just can't wait to see my family and have a nice meal and be in my own bed and appreciate all the things I took for granted and never really thought much about."

Copyright © 2007 Time Inc.

Labels: entertainment

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