Armenians

Martin Marootian, a retired pharmacist who stood up for Armenian genocide victims as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that resulted in a $20-million settlement from New York Life Insurance Co. for failing to honor claims on policies sold to thousands of Armenians slain during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, has died. He was 95. Marootian died Feb. 25 of natural causes at his home in San Diego, said his daughter, Andrea. In 1999 Marootian joined a legal battle to force New York Life to honor policies purchased by more than 2,000 Armenians, most of whom perished in what some historians have described as the first genocide of the 20th century.

U.S. prosecutors accused an Armenian organized crime gang of bilking victims out of an estimated $20 million in an audacious series of financial scams that included replacing the credit-card machines at more than a dozen 99 Cent-Only stores with their own scanners designed to steal customers' banking information. The charges filed Wednesday against alleged members and associates of the Armenian Power gang included allegations of two kidnappings, theft of money from elderly bank customers, the smuggling of cellphones into state prisons, and trafficking in drugs and weapons.

After days of contradictory reports citing unnamed officials, an Iranian security official Saturday publicly confirmed the arrest of a female American described as an alleged spy along its border with Armenia. Deputy national border police Cmdr. Amir-Ahmad Geravand told reporters that a 34-year-old American woman named Hal Talaian was arrested near the border town of Jolfa along the Iran-Armenian border, according to Iran's state-controlled Al-Alam television and the semi-official Fars news agency.

Most who suffer unspeakably at the hands of others look for ways to forget, to resume a normal life as best they can. Some, however, assume the duty of witness in the hope that truthful memory will protect those who come after them. The passing of these heroic men and women ought not to go unremarked upon. J. Michael Hagopian, who died this month in Thousand Oaks, was one such man. He was just 2 years old in 1915, when his parents hid him in a well behind their home because they believed they were about to be killed by Ottoman Turkish soldiers, who were massacring Armenians across eastern Anatolia.

A judge Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order barring Santa Monica from instituting a new taxi franchising system that a group of Armenian American cab drivers say discriminates against them. Judge Robert H. O'Brien gave attorneys until Jan. 7 to show why the preliminary injunction shouldn't be granted in the case filed by the Taxi Drivers Assn. of Santa Monica, which sued the city Tuesday in civil court in downtown Los Angeles. The association represents five cab companies owned or operated by Armenian Americans ?

Lakers star Kobe Bryant's two-year endorsement deal with Turkish Airlines has sparked protest among Armenian Americans in Los Angeles and nationwide, some threatening to boycott the basketball player unless he backs out of the contract. In a statement announcing the deal, Turkish Airlines described Bryant as a "global brand ambassador. " The airline is seeking to publicize the start of nonstop flights in March between Istanbul and Los Angeles with the basketball star appearing in a blitz of TV, billboard, print and online ads early next year.

J. Michael Hagopian, an educational filmmaker who spent 40 years gathering the testimonies of Armenian genocide survivors to provide evidence of one of the most contentious events in world history, died of natural causes Friday at his home in Thousand Oaks. He was 97. His death was announced by the Armenian Film Foundation, which he established in 1979 to preserve Armenian heritage and culture. The filmmaker was a survivor of the genocide, which historians estimate resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman-ruled Turkey beginning in 1915.

Descendants of Armenian victims of genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks can sue insurance companies for unpaid claims over the atrocities, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in a rare reversal. The same three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said in August 2009 that lawsuits were barred by a federal government policy against legal reference to the Armenian genocide despite laws in California and 41 other states recognizing the massacre of 1.2 million Armenians that began in 1915 amid the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Authorities arrested more than two dozen Los Angeles-area residents early Wednesday for their alleged roles in a nationwide scheme to bilk Medicare out of more than $160 million. The investigation, dubbed Diagnosis Dollars, resulted in the arrests of 52 people across the U.S. in what authorities described as "the largest Medicare fraud scheme ever perpetrated by a single criminal enterprise. " The defendants allegedly are members or associates of an Armenian "organized crime enterprise" known as Mirzoyan-Terdjanian, according to federal law enforcement officials.

A Sunday service at a historic church in eastern Turkey underscored both the desire for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and the hurdles that remain nearly a century after a violent massacre of Armenians. It was the first service held in the 1,100-year-old Armenian Church of the Holy Cross since 1915, when a wave of violence nearly destroyed one of the largest Christian communities in the Middle East. Many Armenians in the diaspora and the neighboring republic of Armenia boycotted and denounced Sunday's service on Akdamar Island after Turkish authorities did not allow a cross to be raised on the dome of the church.