“No Armenian military positions are under Azerbaijani control at this point,” Armenia’s First Deputy Defense Minister David Tonoyan told reporters today.
As for reports on the violation of truce, Tonoyan said “shooting continues and no ceasefire has been established.”
“There is an agreement on maintenance of truce, but the rival keeps shooting,” he concluded.
The Armenian forces have destroyed another Azerbaijani tank, a BM-21 (Grad) Multiple Launch Rocket System, an artillery system, engineering equipment, and one drone, the NKR Defense Ministry reports.
The Ministry will provide further information on developments.
Armenian diplomats in Brussels and the delegation of the National Assembly have not suffered as a result of the blasts in the city, Spokesman for the Armenian ministry of Foreign Affairs Tigran Balayan said in a Twitter post.
Several explosions struck Brussels airport and the metro system, causing at least 13 deaths, Belgian media say.
Two blasts tore through the departures area of Zaventem airport shortly after 08:00 local time (07:00 GMT).
An hour later, an explosion hit Maalbeek metro station, close to the EU institutions. The airport and whole metro system have been closed.
The attacks come four days after Salah Abdeslam, the main suspect in the Paris attacks, was captured in Brussels.
The Belgian government has confirmed casualties at the airport but has given no numbers. The cause of the explosions is unknown.
Belgium has now raised its terror threat to its highest level.
Greece and Armenia have reacted to “unacceptable comments” by Turkey’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic who on Thursday criticized Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for their remarks on the Armenian Genocide.
“The centuries-old friendship between the Armenian and Greek peoples is based on interwoven fate and mutual support,” Spokesman for the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Tigran Balayan said.
“Making the denial a pillar of state policy does not exempt Turkey of the responsibility to face its own history,” Balayan added.
“Turkey appears to believe that if history does not agree with its claims, so much worse for history. But this is too precarious a time for cheap and hypocritical rhetoric,” Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson Constantinos Koutras said, in turn.
“Obviously, the Republic of Turkey must abandon its obsessions and come to terms with its historical record. Greece will be on Turkey’s side in this difficult task,” he added.
for their comments on the Armenian Genocide when Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan visited Athens on Wednesday.
“The statements in question are the product of a pathetic mentality,” Bilgic said.
Photo: AP
A homeless man from San Francisco is to be given a reward of $100,000 for helping police recapture two prison inmates who had escaped, the BBC reports.
Matthew Hay-Chapman had seen photographs of the two fugitives on the news and spotted them in a stolen van.
They had broken out of Orange County Jail six days earlier, sparking a state-wide manhunt.
The full $150,000 reward was split between four people, with Mr Hay Chapman getting the largest share.
Two employees of the Target supermarket will each receive $15,000 for alerting officials after surveillance footage showed two men acting suspiciously, officials said.
Canadians all over the country, including Niagara, are stepping forward with offers of assistance and questioning what more they can do to help.
The Syrian refugees who have started to Canada and it is expected that hundreds of additional people will resettle in the Niagara region over the coming months, making this area their new home.
Given that many of the refugees are from a Syrian-Armenian background, the Syrian-Armenian Refugee Committee (SARC), led by the Armenian Community Centre, is working with the Niagara Refugee Assistance Committee to help with the arrival, settlement and building of positive relationships for the new families settling within the community.
The Centre has privately sponsored 8 families and are in the process of welcoming additional families in the near future.
With this in mind, the Armenian Community Centre of St.Catharines is hosting a benefit concert on March 12 featuring local bands, with all proceeds going towards the newly settled families, according to .
By Curt Schleier
The director Atom Egoyan was in a good mood. And why not? He was comfortably ensconced in a posh Los Angeles hotel the morning after his latest film, “Remember,” received an enthusiastic reception at a Museum of Tolerance screening.
But his buzz was soon tempered as we discussed the film and I told him: “I can’t write that. And no, I can’t write that, either.”
The difficulty is that “Remember” is more than a thriller about an older survivor hunting the Nazi who killed his family. It is a film that also offers a “Sixth Sense,” “I see dead people” surprise, and some of what Egoyan told me gave away the whole movie.
But, he claimed, he can’t help himself. “I get so excited about the conversations people have watching the movie,” he said. “You have the tough job of trying to present it in a way that reveals nothing.”
Actually, no. Describing the film is not at all difficult. What is hard, though, is figuring out how it got made in the first place.
Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer) lives in a nursing home. He suffers from dementia, and his wife passed away just a week ago. After the last shiva, his friend Max (Martin Landau) reminds him of a promise Zev made sometime in the past. When his wife died, Zev pledged he’d go out in search of, and kill, the sadistic Auschwitz guard who’d murdered their families. The guard had escaped and was living under the assumed identity of John Kurlander.
Max, confined to a wheel chair and on oxygen, can’t go himself. But, although weak of body, he’s strong of mind. And he’s written step-by-step instructions for Zev to follow when his memory fails. He’s also included a wad of cash for Zev’s use as he searches North America for the correct John Kurlander of several possibilities on Max’s list. There are adventures along the way: He’s almost caught at a Canadian border crossing; he runs into an anti-Semitic state trooper, and he murders someone.
The film is tautly written, and performances are excellent.
Still, you don’t have to be a Hollywood insider to figure out why “Remember” was not a likely candidate for the silver screen. Most obviously, it features old people. Not that old-people movies don’t occasionally break through — witness “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” — but typically those films are uplifting. This is a Holocaust movie.
There’s another, perhaps more subtle, factor at play. Egoyan, 55, was nominated for two Academy Awards — best adapted screenplay and best director — for one of his early films, “The Sweet Hereafter.” Many of his subsequent films did well, too, including “Chloe,” his 2009 erotic thriller.
But since then, well, not so much. His last two films, “The Captive” and “Devil’s Knot,” barely raised critical or financial blips. So logic — or at least my logic — would dictate that you look for a property with a greater chance of financial success.
Not Egoyan: “You have to go with the projects that are unique. I’ve always been drawn to projects that have some element of risk. Here in my hotel room in Los Angeles, I look out the window and I see billboards for films based on tried-and-true formulas. When you are seized by a project that is original, telling a story that hasn’t been told before, that is entertaining and provocative and will lead to a discussion, of course you will take that.”
But there are a couple of additional elements that led to Egoyan’s decision. One was timing: If he didn’t tell this story now, it might never be told. The Nazis and their hunters are dying, and the memory of their atrocities is fading.
Egoyan pointed to the trial of Reinhold Hanning, the SS sergeant on trial in Germany for complicity in the death of 170,000 people at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is 94, and all the witnesses are in their 90s as well. So this may be the last significant Nazi trial.
Timing also became a factor in the casting. Maximilian Schell (one of the stars of “Judgment at Nuremberg”) was hired to play a role, but he died before filming began. A veteran German actor took ill and was unable to take part.
But perhaps the most important reason for Egoyan tackling this project is his affinity for the material. He was born in Egypt of Armenian parents. He was named Atom in honor of the first nuclear power plant in that country. His sister’s birth name was Molecule.
“That was later changed to Eve, so we became Atom and Eve, so we stood out like a sore thumb,” he said.
In 1962, the rise of Arab nationalism in Egypt, where the Armenian community was targeted, forced his parents to leave. They ended up in Victoria, British Columbia, where, like many first-generation immigrants, Egoyan felt out of place.
“We were the only Armenian family there. I was always aware of being an outsider. I wanted nothing more than to assimilate. There was nothing that gave me a sense of pride [in being Armenian]. I wanted to avoid and escape from that.
“That changed when I went to university and met other Armenian students and became active in the movement to figure out what we are going to do with this history. I became consumed by that.”
Egoyan’s paternal grandparents were survivors of the genocide, a genocide that has never been acknowledged by the Ottoman Empire or Turkey. “That’s why this story [‘Remember’] had such a strong appeal to me,” Egoyan explained. “It was about the denial of justice. It is what Max feels. He’s at the end of his life, and he feels this sense of rage, this sense of injustice.”
He notes that, growing up, “I probably knew more about the Holocaust than the Armenian genocide.” But the knowledge of it “was buried inside me, because the sense of trauma was transmitted to me in some way. And that’s why I was drawn to this film.”
Photo: Reuters/Faisal Al Nasser/Files
Moscow is monitoring how the situation unfolds regarding the possible deployment of Saudi military forces to Syria, Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov said Friday, reports.
Earlier in the day, the Guardian newspaper reported that Saudi Arabia could send thousands of ground forces to Syria, most likely in coordination with Turkey, in order to take part in the fight against ISIS.
“Naturally, we are carefully monitoring the situation,” Peskov said.
He added that the Kremlin currently does not have any facts confirming the validity of the reports on the Saudi plans.
Moscow has been conducting air strikes against IS and Nusra Front targets in Syria since September 30, at Damascus’ request.
Asbarez – The Armenian-International Business Forum will be held in Paris, on April 16, 2016 at the Westin Paris-Vendôme hotel.
The Forum aims to give concrete meaning to business relations between Armenians worldwide.
About hundred businessmen with the most remarkable history and experience will meet in Paris to put the foundation of the Armenian Business Agency which will come into operation the next working day of the Forum, on April 18, 2016 in Paris.
The Forum’s program is the following:
Businessmen from twenty countries will take part in this Forum. If you are a businessman, an entrepreneur or executive, you can also take part by registering beforehand.
Project holders are also invited to present their projects. These projects will be delivered to the attention of participants and other investors of our Le Cercle d’Affaires.
The Armenian-International Business Forum in Paris and the Armenian Business Agency are the realization of a dream shared by a large number of Armenian Entrepreneurs and beyond, which will help, apart from individual business achievements, the development of Armenia and of diaspora communities.
The aim of the A.B.A. comprises the following:
The A.B.A is an Armenian structure involving professionals working to create a project development and business office.
This office will be open for all levels of companies, because large and small, project developers and investors together can make the Armenian business community better organized and stronger.
This Armenian structure will not be exclusively oriented towards the Armenians. On one hand the business doesn’t recognize any national or ethnic boundaries and on the other, the Armenians have always lived and worked in open environments.
“Dildilian Brothers: Photography and the Story of an Armenian Family in Anatolia, 1888-1923,” a book by Armen T. Marsoobian, an Armenian-American professor, has finally been translated into Turkish and is ready to enter the libraries of Turkish bookworms, reports.
Some four years after it was published in 2011 in English, the Turkish translation of the book, produced by the initiative of the Birzamanlar Publishing House, has hit the shelves with a ceremony attended by booklovers in İstanbul on Tuesday.
“This book is just one moment in a long labor of love that I started many years ago. It first began as a private journey in the 1980s. My uncle gave me the collection of photographs, the family archive. And for many years I only shared these photos with family members at family reunions and gatherings. I realized that the family had made great efforts to document and record their lives in Ottoman Turkey. And in one way they were trying to keep the memory of the Armenian community in Anatolia alive and therefore would have been very pleased to make this public,” Marsoobian said in a speech he delivered at the celebration of the book’s launching.
“This is a journey that I am still on. It is nice to start the new year with a new book. I feel very committed to this project and this county. I will be here [Turkey] again and again,” the professor added.
Marsoobian’s book features the story of his forebears, the Dildilian family, who documented their lives in Sivas, Merzifon and Samsun and the surrounding areas of Anatolia from the second half of the 19th century, a period that was full of suffering for Armenians. In the book, from his family archives, the professor presents drawings, maps and photographs that go back as early as 1888.
The historic photos in the book contribute to our imagination of Armenian daily life at that time, the old and rare photographs of places, people and situations (e.g. camel caravans, college workshops, weddings, etc.) concretize a past that is long over and visually under-documented. Thanks to these photos, the reader can observe the sad and happy moments in the family’s history as well as the fear and perseverance that the survivors of 1915 harbored in the post-World War I years.
“During this journey, Ferda [Keskin, a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at İstanbul Bilgi University] and I traveled for the first time to Merzifon in 2011. Then in 2013, we launched an exhibition in Istanbul featuring the photograph archive. We took the exhibition in Merzifon in 2013 and then Diyarbakır in 2014. We were then able to bring the exhibition to Ankara in 2015. The last year was really busy year for me as we launched exhibitions in United States and Yerevan, which was also very important to me,” Marsoobian stated.
Professor Marsoobian previously came to public attention in Turkey after he opened exhibitions in various provinces in Turkey featuring a photograph archive that was collected by his extended family, who documented the social life of Anatolia during the 19th century with their cameras.
So far, he has staged exhibitions in İstanbul, Merzifon, Diyarbakır and Ankara. In an exclusive interview with Sunday’s Zaman, the professor stated that he wanted to exhibit the photos in Turkey because he wanted to show people that “a century ago, there was a rich cultural past in these lands.”
“We wanted to shed light on the forgotten history of the 19th century with these photos. If Armenians had not been forced to leave this area, Anatolia would be much [culturally] richer today,” Marsoobian said.
Sharing details about the intentions of his exhibitions and his book, Marsoobian said: “The exhibition changes a little, depending on the location. But what I would like to do is to expose Turkish citizens, whether they are of Armenian background or not, to the cultural wealth of these lands from which Armenians were removed in 1915 and where, in the years after, they were silenced and repressed.”