Month: November 2016

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian will visit Berlin November 3-4, where he is set to meet with German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier.

Minister Nalbandian is also expected to meet with Christoph Heusgen, Chancellor Angele Merkel’s Foreign and Security Policy Adviser.

Within the framework of the visit Edward Nalbandian will hold meetings with Members of Parliament, leading political scientists and experts.

Jose Mourinho is taking 21 players with him to Istanbul for Manchester United’s Europa League meeting with Fenerbahce on Thursday, accoridng to Manchester United’s official website. 

Phil Jones, who has yet to make an appearance this season, is included after injury but fellow defender Chris Smalling has not made the trip. Tim Fosu-Mensah, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Anthony Martial have also been named in the squad but Michael Carrick, Memphis Depay and Antonio Valencia will remain in Manchester.

Bastian Schweinsteiger, who trained with the players this week, has not travelled as he is ineligible for the group stages of the Europa League.

The Reds are currently level on points with first-placed Feyenoord on six points. Both sides have won two and lost one, but the Dutch side are top of Group A by virtue of the head-to-head record following Feyenoord’s 1-0 win over the Reds in September. Fenerbahce, who the Reds overcame 4-1 at Old Traffordtwo weeks ago, lie third on four points, with Zorya Luhansk bottom of the group on just one point.

United squad: De Gea, Romero, Johnstone; Blind, Jones, Darmian, Fosu-Mensah, Rojo, Shaw; Fellaini, Herrera, Mkhitaryan, Lingard, Mata, Pogba, Schneiderlin, Young; Ibrahimovic, Martial, Rashford, Rooney.

The Hayastan All-Armenian Fund has begun construction on a new kindergarten in Aghdzk, a village in Armenia’s Aragatsotn Region. The project is sponsored by the British-Armenian community.

The future kindergarten will be a two-story structure featuring a full complement of amenities and comforts. In addition to bright, spacious classrooms and naprooms, the facility will have a gym, a game hall, a computer room, and a sizeable playground, all of which will make for an enriching educational and leisure environment. The kindergarten will accommodate up to 90 students.

“As our old kindergarten had to be shut down three years ago because the building was no longer safe, the fact that our British-Armenian compatriots are now sponsoring the construction of a new kindergarten is a source of great joy to our community,” said Aghdzk mayor Arsen Avdalyan.

With an abiding commitment to the education and healthy development of children in the homeland, the British-Armenian community sponsors projects mainly in the education and health fields. In recent years, the Hayastan All-Armenian Fund has implemented several major projects through British-Armenian support, including the construction of a kindergarten in the village of Sasunik, Armenia; and the reconstruction of the boarding kindergarten of Yerevan’s Shengavit district.

To mark International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has of 35 presidents, politicians, religious leaders, militias and criminal organizations that censor, imprison, torture or murder journalists.

Most of these press freedom predators have been preying on the media for years, some for decades.

Their predatory techniques vary. Some use enforcers to torture and murder. Some use mass arrests and arbitrary imprisonment. Others employ more sophisticated methods such as terrorism laws, lèse-majesté charges or financial asphyxiation. The list is not exhaustive, naming only those who have distinguished themselves the most in the past year.

As in the past, most of the predators are presidents or prime ministers of such countries as Singapore, Thailand, Cuba, Eritrea, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

The list’s new entrants include Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who now controls most of his country’s media groups.

With regard to religious extremism, the Islamic State stops at nothing to impose terror, kidnapping and murdering journalists who do not swear allegiance, while Bangladesh’s Ansarullah Bangla Team posts lists of alleged blasphemers (secularist bloggers and freethinkers) on Facebook and calls for them to be murdered.

The list includes President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad, President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

President Serzh Sargsyan sent a congratulatory message to Michel Aoun on his election as President of the Republic of Lebanon.

“I am confident that your years-long experience and endless dedication to the prosperous and safe future of Lebanon will contribute toward this goal. I have no doubt that during your tenure in office the friendship of the Armenian and Lebanese peoples, which comes from the depth of history, will strengthen even more and will acquire new qualities.

I wish you excellent health as well as strength and tenacity in reaching all your goals and implementation of all your programs,” reads the congratulatory message of the President of Armenia.

The College of Arts & Sciences of the Boston University (BU) launches new minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The faculty hopes that BU students won’t just learn history, but learn from history. Students will study how the 20th century’s most horrific state-sponsored mass murders, from the Nazi Holocaust to Pol Pot’s wholesale slaughter in Cambodia to Rwanda’s deadly rampage against its Tutsis, evolved.

As well, the new minor will offer historical context and teach humane vigilance, says Nancy Harrowitz, a CAS associate professor of Italian, who is teaching the minor’s required course, History of the Holocaust. The minor is being offered through the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Through study of world genocide in the 20th and current centuries, “we are protecting memory,” says Harrowitz. “How do you sustain these memories in the face of deniers?” she asks. “My argument has been: if we are not able to prevent future genocides per se, in the long term we can begin to illuminate the emotional aspects of hate through education.”

Hate is a learned emotion, says Simon Payaslian, the Charles K. and Elizabeth M. Kenosian Professor of Armenian History and Literature. “We’re not born with it. It can be unlearned. Genocide can happen anywhere.”

Payaslian, who teaches courses in genocide prevention, notes in his course descriptions that the subject of genocide warrants rigorous study because genocidal acts and atrocities persist despite the 1948 United Nations adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention, criminalizing genocide in the realm of international law, was institutionalized in 1951, and yet it has failed to prevent the string of genocides that has occurred since then.

“Societies are always changing,” says Payaslian. “The question that’s absolutely essential is, what kind of leaders do you have? One of my classes covers the internment of Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor. You can imagine how one more executive order could have put the Japanese against a wall and shot them.”

According to its description on the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies website, the minor in Holocaust and genocide studies offers students “an opportunity to acquire basic academic tools of description and analysis of the various factors that contribute to the emergence of ultranationalist regimes and their genocidal policies.” The minor is also designed to help students “develop an awareness of the value of pluralism and an acceptance of diversity, as well as to explore the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic, and indifferent to the vilification and oppression of others.”

Although genocides large and small have been perpetrated throughout human history, the courses will focus on historical events since 1900. These include the Armenian genocide of 1915, when the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire had rounded up and deported or executed 1.5 million Armenians living there, most of them Ottoman citizens, by 1922; the Nazi Holocaust, from 1933 until the Allied liberation of the death camps in 1945, which claimed the lives of six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents from the European countries occupied by Germany; the Cambodian genocide, from 1975 to 1979, when the Maoist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot slaughtered an estimated three million; the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnians in the wake of the 1992 collapse of the former Yugoslavia, killing 100,000; the 1994 Hutu-led killing rampage in Rwanda, which targeted Tutsis and moderate Hutus and slaughtered more than 800,000 over 100 days; and most recently, this century’s Sudan state-sanctioned murder of at least 300,000 Darfurian civilians in what is now South Sudan.

Armenia and Iran have initialed a Memorandum of Understanding on the purchase and sale and transit of gas.

The document was signed during the visit of a delegation of the Armenian Ministry of Energy Infrastructures and Natural Resources to the Islamic Republic of Iran from October 31 to November 1.

The Armenian delegation led by Deputy Minister Hayk Harutyunyan had a number of meetings within the framework of the visit.

Issues related to the current cooperation between the two countries, the expansion of regional cooperation, namely the perspectives of transiting gas to third countries through Armenia’s territory were discussed at a meeting with Hamid Reza Araghi, Deputy Petroleum Minister for Gas Affairs & Managing Director of National Iranian Gas Company.

During the meeting with Iran’s Deputy Minister of Iranian Deputy Energy Minister Houshang Falahatian the parties discussed issues of increasing the volumes of electricity exchange and the perspectives of expansion of regional cooperation.

President Serzh Sargsyan received today US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter.

The Armenian President hailed the consistent development of the Armenian-American relations ever since the establishment of diplomatic relations, and noted that the two countries are approaching the 25^th anniversary of relations with serious achievements registered over the past few years.

President Sargsyan expressed gratitude to the US Government for the continuous support to Armenia’s economic development, implementation of reforms in different spheres, development of democracy and civil society.  He praised the US role in the maintenance of peace in the region.

President Sargsyan attached importance to the Armenian-American cooperation in the field of defense, especially the US support to the defense reforms in Armenia, and development of capacities in military medicine, mine clearance and peacekeeping.

The interlocutors noted that the current high-level relations between Armenia and the US are based on mutual respect, and the two countries enjoy firm partnership relations both in bilateral and multilateral formats.

The US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense expressed gratitude for Armenia’s contribution to peacekeeping missions.

Serzh Sargsyan and Michael Carpenter discussed issues related to the cooperation in the military field, regional and international security.

Peter Balakian received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry at the 100^th  anniversary Ceremony of the Pulitzer Prizes held at Columbia University on Oct. 13. Balakian was one of the seven recipients in the fields of Letters, Drama, and Music, the reports.

Among the other recipients were Viet Thanh Nguyen in fiction for his novel The Sympathizer, Lin-Manuel Miranda in drama for the musical Hamilton, and jazz composer Henry Threadgill for “In For a Penny In for a Pound.” Among the fourteen prizes in journalism were Kathryn Schultz for Feature Writing at the New Yorker, Alyssa J. Rubin for International Reporting at The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times Staff for Breaking News Reporting.

Professor Daniele Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center For Ethics at Harvard University, was the keynote speaker. The awards were presented by Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University.

The Pulitzer committee cited Ozone Journal for “poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.” Writing about Ozone Journal in Consequence Magazine, Keith Jones wrote: “Balakian is a master of—the drifting, split-second mirage, the cinematic dissolve and cross-cut as well as the sculptural, statuesque moment chiseled out of consonant blends and an imagistic, jazzman’s ear for vowels… beautiful, haunting, plaintive, urgent, in our dying world’s age, these poems legislate a vital comportment to the demands of our shared present, timely and untimely both.” And David Wojahn in Tikkun wrote: “Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian.”

Balakian is the first Armenian American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize since William Saroyan in 1940.

The prime minister of Iraq has urged the Islamic State group to surrender as government troops close in on its last urban stronghold in the country, Mosul, the BBC reports.

Haider al-Abadi appeared on state TV wearing combat fatigues and said: “They have no choice. Either they surrender or they die.”

Iraqi special forces are now about 1km (0.6 of a mile) away from Mosul’s eastern edge and preparing to enter.

Units of the army are meanwhile advancing from the south.

Using another name for IS, Mr al-Abadi said: “We will close in on Daesh from all angles and God willing we will cut the snake’s head. They will have no way out and no way to escape.”

Mr al-Abadi is the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi armed forces.