Armenian football federation president Ruben Airapetyan has promised the national squad a three-million-euro bonus if they secure qualification for the Euro-2012 finals, local media reported Friday.

After eight of their 10 qualifying matches Armenia sit third in Group B on 14 points, one behind the Republic of Ireland and three behind leaders Russia. Slovakia are fourth, also on 14 points.

Armenia's top chess players, lauded as heroes after winning the 2011 World Team Chess Championship this week, vowed on Friday to boost the small chess-mad country's status in the game even further.

The team's head coach said that future successes will be secured through official support and an unusual new scheme to promote the game among schoolchildren initiated by Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian, a keen player who also heads the country's Chess Federation.

Turkey began Tuesday to demolish a 100 foot monument near its eastern border dedicated to friendship with Armenia after the prime minister called it a "monstrosity", Anatolia news agency reported.

Overriding widespread protests, the company tasked with demolition by the local authorities in Kars city took apart the first piece, which is one of two heads of the statue, depicting two figures emerging from one human shape, a witness told Agence France Presse.

Armenians on Sunday marked 96 years since the mass killings of their ancestors under the Ottoman Empire amid apparent deadlock in the process of normalizing relations with modern Turkey.

Armenia contends the killings were a genocide -- a label supported by some countries but vehemently opposed by Turkey -- and the controversy has poisoned ties between Yerevan and Ankara to this day.

Armenia is to make chess a compulsory subject in primary schools in an attempt to turn itself into a global force in the game, the education ministry said on Friday.

"Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower," an official at the ministry, Arman Aivazian, told Agence France Presse.

Georgian police arrested a 75-year-old woman who single-handedly cut off Internet connections in Georgia and neighboring Armenia, the interior ministry in Tbilisi said on Wednesday.

The pensioner was digging for scrap metal when she hacked into a fiber-optic cable which runs through Georgia to Armenia, forcing many thousands of Internet users in both countries offline for several hours on March 28.

Iranian boys in jeans and leather jackets and girls in short dresses lose themselves in the rhythms of their idols, swaying to the beat and mouthing lyrics which are banned in their home country.

Singers who are not allowed to play live in Iran entertain their fans every year at the Sport-Concert Complex in neighboring Armenia -- a relatively liberal Christian country which is attracting increasing numbers of tourists from the Islamic republic during the Persian new year festival of Nowruz.

Thousands of protesters occupied a central square in the Armenian capital on Thursday, forcing riot police to withdraw in a show of strength aimed at forcing the government to resign.

After holding a rally attended by more than 12,000 people, demonstrators marched through the city to Freedom Square -- the scene of mass protests in 2008 which ended in violence and left 10 people dead.

Construction will begin this year of a pipeline taking oil from Iran to Armenia, boosting the isolated ex-Soviet state's energy security, the Armenian energy minister said on Tuesday.

The 365-kilometre (227-mile) pipeline from the Iranian city of Tabriz to Eraskh in Armenia follows the opening of a gas pipeline from Iran and will provide the country with an alternative to Russian energy imports, which were disrupted by the Georgia-Russia war in 2008.