6 pre-school institutions in Alaverdi have nurses in their staff list.
However, no supervision over the work of nurses is carried out by medical institutions, and officers from the municipality, cannot control the professional activities of nurses.
Author: Babken Chilingarian
Iran and Armenia looking for new investor for Meghri hydropower plant construction
ARKA, Armenia
Oct 31 2017
YEREVAN, October 31. /ARKA/. Armenia and Iran are looking for a new investor for the construction of a hydropower plant on the River of Arax near the town of Meghri in southern Armenia, Deputy Minister of Energy Infrastructures and Natural Resources Hayk Harutyunyan said today during a parliamentary discussion on the draft budget for 2018.
According to an agreement, signed between Armenia and Iran back in 2007, the hydroelectric power plant, which was to straddle the border river, was to have the capacity to produce 130 megawatts (MW) of electricity. Construction of the power plant was to start simultaneously in Armenia’s Meghri and Iran’s Qarachilar. Each of the stations was to annually produce 793 million kW / h of electricity.
According to Iranian authorities, the construction was to last for five years and cost $323 million. The funding was to come from an Iranian investment company. This project was designed to give an additional boost to economic development of the region and give also a fresh impetus to improving the efficiency of bilateral economic programs.
The feasibility work was done by Iranian consulting company Sagab-Gods. The generated energy was to be shipped to Iran via a 230 KW transmission line now under construction. After the facility was to be built it was to be operated for 15 years by the Iranian Farat-Sepasat. The electricity was to be supplied to Iran to pay off the Iranian investment. After 15 years of operation, the hydropower was to become the property of Armenia.
“Although the agreement has long been in force, the Iranian company has not made any investments to this day, so the governments of Armenia and Iran have to look for another investor,” Harutyunyan said today.
The foundation laying ceremony for the Meghri hydropower plant was held on November 8, 2012. However, due to environmental problems related to the reduction of water volume in the Arax River, as well as the increase of water intakes from Turkey in the northern part of Armenia, it was necessary to revise this project towards capacity reduction to about 100 MW, according to the deputy minister. -0-
Chess: Armenian teams to face Switzerland, Greece in European Championship R1
PanArmenian, Armenia
Oct 28 2017
Armenian teams to face Switzerland, Greece in European Championship R1
The European Team Chess Championship among men and women is starting on the Greek island of Crete on Saturday, October 28.
Rivals of the Armenian national teams in the first round have been unveiled, the press service of the National Olympic Committee reports.
The men’s team will play against the team of Switzerland, while the women’s team will face their rivals from Greece.
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun: A Spacewoman Came Travelling
Sunday Business Post
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun: A Spacewoman Came Travelling
by Leanna Byrne
HIGHLIGHT: Space conductor, scientist, experience-maker and more: Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun is so compelling they’ve created both a Barbie doll and a Lego figure in her image. Leanna Byrne spoke to her ahead of her Dublin visit, where she’ll be sharing her intergalactic ideas at The Future conference. Feeling inadequate? Good. Then let’s begin
Successful people will always get asked how they got to where they are. But in Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun’s case, the question is not only about the how, but the why.
Why, in 2012, did she assemble the International Space Orchestra (ISO), the world’s first orchestra of space scientists and astronauts from Nasa?
Why did she bring together designers, thinkers and entrepreneurs to launch the University of the Underground, a free MA programme for experiential design?
Why did she decide to produce a futuristic feature-length movie on the chain of command in place in the event of an asteroid hitting the Earth?
For Ben Hayoun, there is just one answer: to change the world.
“There is a need for decision-making creatives to be at the top level. I want to know that, in the next five years, I will have played a part in making the next president a creative, or someone in design or graphic art. I want to support that. Too often as creatives we think that our place in the world is not something we should play a part in. If we were playing a part, things would be a bit different,” she says.
Named by the commercial arts and design magazine Creative Review as one of the top 50 creative leaders driving change in the world at large in June, Ben Hayoun has a CV as impressive as it is diverse.
In 2014, Wired magazine awarded her with an Innovation Fellowship for her work and its ‘significant impact on the world’. The following year, she was nominated for a Women of the Year Achievement Award. She is designer of experiences at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, head of experiences at WeTransfer, a member of the Space Outreach and Education Committee at the International Astronautical Federation, a United Nations Adviser to the UN Virtual Reality labs, an advisory board member at the American Institute for Graphic Arts in Los Angeles and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association. And there’s lots more, certainly more than the space here will allow. She is – for the record – 32 years of age.
Too eclectic to be nailed down to one discipline, Ben Hayoun likes to strafe between film, design, music, semiotics, politics, digital and scientific practices.Somewhat ironically, the pressure to fit into a particular category has made her who she is today.
A space Barbie doll named after herself
Born in Valence in south-eastern France, Ben Hayoun was creative from a very young age. At secondary school, however, while preparing for her baccalauréat, she was compelled to choose between her love for creativity and her love for science.
“I chose science,” she tells me, “but I became friends with the tutors in fine art and started taking their classes. That’s where I started to see the possibilities of what the institution offered and, to some extent, that there was no limit.”
Graduating with a scientific Bac, Ben Hayoun toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor. She applied to study medicine, but also tried her hand at being accepted to one of four of Paris’s finest art schools.
On first attempt, she failed to make the cut. “These four schools were extremely competitive because there was just a few places. I applied for it straight after my Bac, but I didn’t get in. I thought: ‘That’s not right. This isn’t possible, I need to go in.’ So the year after, I applied, and I eventually got it,” she says.
Ben Hayoun trained in painting and later textile design at Olivier de Serres National College of Art and Design in Paris, before graduating from Design Interactions (MA) at the Royal College of Art. More recently, she was awarded a PhD in Human Geography and Political Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Despite having a family history in the textiles industry, Ben Hayoun soon realised that she had not inherited her family’s skill. “My family came from Armenia, and they started in textiles like a lot of immigrants in the south of France. But I was crap at it. I was really bad,” she says.
Instead, she ended up doing a project on ceramics and, aged 19, spent time making kimonos in Japan. It took four years of picking fruit in the south of France to save up for the trip, she recalls.
In Japan, Ben Hayoun secured an internship with three brothers who were creating fashion designer Issey Miyake’s A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) collection, but only after she was asked to make chimneys out of cement for three months to prove her worth.
Indeed, she says that she has always been drawn to the unattainable.
“I’ve always wondered why I was so fascinated by space. Now I know that I am intrigued by places that are not welcome or that are not really open and are difficult to access. The more difficult it is to access, the more interesting it is to me,” she says.
“It took seven years for me to make it into Nasa. But by 2012, I made my way in there and eventually got into developing this project, which was the international space orchestra.”
Eventually, Ben Hayoun left Japan to enrol in the British Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions course.
Listening to a talk by the organisers of the course, one comment stuck: “People are not consumers or users, but they are complex human beings.”
“That just really hit me,” says Ben Hayoun.
By 2009, she had finished the course and founded Nelly Ben Hayoun Studio to focus on experience design.
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun with musician Beck
Four years later, her recordings by the International Space Orchestra, entitled Ground Control: An Opera in Space, were released from the International Space Station. That same year, the International Space Orchestra feature film had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
In 2015, Ben Hayoun released her feature film Disaster Playground, a film based on an investigation of emergency procedures for disasters such as Earth-bound rogue asteroids. The film includes an original soundtrack featuring electronic music label Ed Banger Records and 1990s dance legends the Prodigy, as well as an orchestration by the International Space Orchestra.
Now she is working on her next big feature film, digital platform and exhibition entitled The Life, the Sea and the Space Viking.
Described as a “space odyssey and Viking saga 11km under the sea”, the film will document how minute life on Earth can inform colonisation across distant planets.
“It’s probably my biggest project, working with eight other scientists and looking for forms of life with the perspective that all we need to know about other space colonisation is actually here on Earth,” says Ben Hayoun.
Then there’s the University of the Underground, the free MA programme she launched earlier this year and which her studio manages.
Spread across two continents and a number of different countries and states, how does one person have enough time for all of this?
“I have doppelgängers,” she smiles. “Sometimes I don’t go to a place, but they go instead of me. It does work. People know that it’s Nelly 2.0 or 3.0, but my doppelgängers know what they have to say and go instead. There’s a lot to say about the expense of being physically somewhere, you know?”
Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun is one of a wide variety of speakers taking part in The Future conference at the RDS in Dublin from November 2-4. For more information, and to book tickets, see
Chess: Armenia’s Karen Grigoryan claims silver at Negros Open int’l chess tour
Panorama, Armenia
Oct 19 2017
Sport 16:38 19/10/2017Armenia
Negros Open International Chess Championship concluded in Philippines on Thursday, attended by 61 players from 5 states, including 7 Grandmasters and 6 International Masters.
English chess grandmaster Nigel Short who was also the highest ranked player of the tournament won the Championship scoring 8 out 9 points.
The Armenian GM Karen Grigoryan who was closely trailing the leader during the tournament, ultimately took the second place with 7 points, while Nguen Duk Hoa took the third place, the Chess Federation of Armenia reported.
Marseille : Charles Aznavour porte haut la voix des Arméniens
La Provence , France
30 sept 2017
Marseille : Charles Aznavour porte haut la voix des Arméniens
Samedi 30/09/2017 à 05H36 Dimanche 01/10/2017 à 09H26 Marseille
Les stars savent se faire désirer. Et les fans sont prêts à tous les sacrifices pour attendre la vedette qu’ils adorent, tout le monde le sait. C’est avec plus d’une heure vingt de retard sur l’horaire prévu que Charles Aznavour a fait son apparition, hier, sur le stand de l’Arménie devant une nuée de photographes et dans une franche bousculade.
Lunettes sombres, blouson beige, le chanteur âgé de 93 ans s’est frayé difficilement un chemin parmi les personnalités présentes, souvent issues du monde politique et de la communauté arménienne de Marseille, ainsi que de nombreux anonymes. Sacrifiant à la tradition de l’hospitalité qui veut que l’on accueille ses invités avec le pain et le sel, en guise de bienvenue.
Accueilli par Garo Hovsepian, président de la Maison arménienne de la jeunesse et de la culture, l’artiste a fait une brève déclaration après les traditionnelles allocutions officielles. Il a notamment adressé un message à une communauté dynamique, fière de ses racines :“Depuis le temps que nous sommes en France, nous sommes aujourd’hui des Français Arméniens.” S’amusant également à lancer une proposition pour changer la dénomination de la gare Saint-Charles (“Charles est un prénom que je partage avec mon ami Trenet”) pour la rebaptiser “Marcel Pagnol”. Un clin d’oeil adressé à Nicolas Pagnol, petit-fils du célébrissime académicien, présent sur le stand, à ses côtés.
Une exposante de la foire de Marseille braquée
Très sollicité par le public, le chanteur arménien le plus connu au monde avait annoncé cette semaine seulement sa venue à la Foire de Marseille pour marquer symboliquement de sa présence la Journée officielle de l’Arménie. Journée animée par une série d’initiatives qui a été consacrée à l’Artsakh, avec la présence de son représentant en France, Hovhannes Guevorkian, du Consul général d’Arménie à Marseille ainsi que de nombreux représentants du Conseil départemental.
Au mois d’août dernier, Charles Aznavour, classé“chanteur de variétés le plus important du XXe siècle”par Time et CNN avait inauguré son “étoile” sur le Walk of fame (Promenade de la célébrité) à Los Angeles. À la même période, il avait annoncé par la voix de son producteur Gérard Drouot reprendre le chemin d’une tournée française après sept ans de silence, entre le 20 janvier et le 6 février. Avec Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Lille et Marseille comme étapes, ville dans laquelle il se présentera, au Dôme, le 23 janvier.
À l’étranger, on le verra encore en Israël (Tel Aviv), en Bulgarie (Sofia) et en Russie (Saint-Pétersbourg et Moscou). Un chanteur inaltérable on vous dit, à la carrière universelle.
Philippe Faner
http://www.laprovence.com/article/sorties-loisirs/4641990/marseille-charles-aznavour-porte-haut-la-voix-des-armeniens.html
Charles Aznavour, 93, receives star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
PanArmenian, Armenia
Aug 25 2017
– 12:52 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – French-Armenian singer and entertainer Charles Aznavour received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday, August 24 after a more than 70-year career.
The 93-year-old singer, who was attending the event, described himself as happy at the honor – with reservations.
“The word I can say is happy, and with a part of emotion, of course, because we are far away from my country, from my way of living, from my way of being received by the people,” he said at the Hollywood ceremony.
Aznavour, 93, who was born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris to Armenian parents, has sold more than 100 million records in 80 countries. He has been described as France’s equivalent to Frank Sinatra.
Arpi Stepanyan: Without love there is no winning in mathematics
MediaMax, Armenia
Aug 21 2017
Chess: Armenia’s Levon Aronian solely wins St. Louis Rapid 2017
Panorama, Armenia
Aug 17 2017
The Rapid event of the Rapid and Blitz competition, the fourth stop on the Grand Chess Tour 2017 taking place at Saint Louis, U.S is over, with Armenian GM Levon Aronian becoming the sole winner of the event.
In the final three rounds of the tournament held yesterday, Aronian outplayed Karjakin and Dominguez, drawing with Nakamura, Chess.am reports.
Collecting a total of 12 points, the Armenian GM became the sole winner of the event. Nakamura and Caruana shared 2-3 spots with 11 points apiece. 13th World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov lost his two games and drew one, sharing 8-10 positions with 7 points.
The Blitz chess will kick off on Thursday. The event will run two days, with 9 rounds to be played each day.