20:52,
YEREVAN, 18 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. The World Bank has lowered its global economic growth forecast for 2022 from 4.1 percent to 3.2 percent, ARMENPRESS reports "RIA Novosti" informs President of the World Bank David Malpass said.
David Malpass called the events in Ukraine, the coronavirus blockade in China, the rise in energy, fertilizer and food prices, and the high probability of rising interest rates among the factors slowing down economic activity.
12:56,
YEREVAN, APRIL 16, ARMENPRESS. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that between 2500 or 3000 Ukrainian troops were killed in action during the fighting against Russian forces.
Zelensky told CNN's Jake Tapper that there are about 10,000 Ukrainian troops who have been injured and that it's "hard to say how many will survive."
Civilian casualties are more difficult to quantify, he said.
"It is very difficult to talk about civilians, since south of our country, where the towns and cities are blocked — Kherson, Berdyansk, Mariupol further east, and the area to the east where Volnovakha is — we just don't know how many people have died in that area that is blocked," Zelensky said.
According to Zelensky Russia's military casualty stands at 19,000 to 20,000. However Russia has so far acknowledged 1,351 military casualties.
Political analyst Stepan Danielyan accused the current Armenian authorities of taking steps that would lead the country to another defeat after the one it suffered in the 2020 war.
"The Artsakh problem is more than just an Armenian-Azerbaijani issue. If we consider it at the Armenian-Azerbaijani plane, it has no solution as it won't be allowed either. The developments in Ukraine go to prove it,” he wrote on Facebook on Saturday.
“In 2020, we were defeated even before the war started; we failed in diplomacy, or because of its absence, or rather, the current prime minister did everything possible and impossible so that the war started and we were left alone against the great coalition formed against us. There is good reason to believe that it was done on purpose.
“The search for a way out of the current situation will take place amid the transformation of the world order. The current regime continues to do everything for us to suffer a defeat again,” Danielyan said.
David Baghdasaryan, a member of the opposition Homeland Party, has reacted to the statements made by Nikol Pashinyan in the Armenian parliament on Wednesday.
"The surrender of Artsakh at the hands of Nikol is entering its final stage,” he wrote on Facebook.
“Today the international community is clearly telling us that being the only country in the world that does not recognize the territorial integrity of Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan poses a great threat to both Artsakh and Armenia. Today the international community is again telling us to lower our bar on the issue of Artsakh's status,” Pashinyan said, addressing lawmakers.
“What does it mean? To put it simply, Nikol Pashinyan and his regime have reconciled to the idea that Artsakh, with or without its status, may be part of Azerbaijan. In other words, the junta, that has renounced the homeland, has decided to completely surrender Artsakh in the literal sense of the word,” Baghdasaryan said.
15:47,
YEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. On April 12, a special envelope was postmarked dedicated to the 30th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Egypt, HayPost reported.
The postmarking was carried out by the Acting High-Tech Industry Minister Davit Sahakyan, HayPost CEO Hayk Karapetyan, the Head of the Division of Middle East and African Countries at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Armen Melkonyan, the Ambassador of Egypt to Armenia Bahaa El Din Bahgat Dessouki and the President of the Union of Philatelists Hovik Musayelyan.
The envelope pictures Mount Ararat and Egyptian pyramids, and reads “Diplomatic Relations Between the Republic of Armenia and the Arab Republic of Egypt" in Armenian and English languages, stamped with the post stamp dedicated to the anniversary.
13:00,
YEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. On April 11 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Armenia hosted the “Maraga 30: Unpunished and Ongoing Genocide” Seminar dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Maraga massacre – the genocidal killings of peaceful Armenian population of the village of Maraga in Artsakh’s Martakert region committed by the Azerbaijani military.
The seminar was organized by the NAS Institute of History, the Against Legal Arbitrariness NGO and the Center of Human Rights and Genocide Studies NGO.
“This is history and we must remember it. This was the beginning of a series of genocides perpetrated by Azerbaijan against the Armenian people. Historians, all of us must work in order for this to remain in history as a memory, and that generations remember it,” NAS President Ashot Saghyan said in his remarks.
“Genocide happened all across Armenia. This was committed not only by the authorities of Ottoman Turkey but also by Azerbaijan which was created by the Young Turks and Turkey,” said Against Legal Arbitrariness Executive Director Larisa Alaverdyan.
NAS Institute of History Director Ashot Melkonyan said the Maraga massacre was one circle of the entire chain of genocidal policy.
“The genocidal policy directly passed on from the Ottoman Empire to the First Republic of Azerbaijan, it had other manifestations in the Soviet years, and during the third Republic we saw what manifestations happened by Azerbaijan in 1991-1994, in April of 2016 and in 2020. The Maraga genocide was left in the shadow. It was an example of a war crime against the peaceful population. This seminar will be another occasion to study in depth and note the entire genocidal policy which Azerbaijan inherited from Ottoman Turkey and continues to this day,” he said
The grounds and possibilities for a possible application to the international court over the Armenian Genocide was also discussed at the seminar.
The continuous genocide against Armenians, the responsibility of the Turkish-Azeri authorities and the issues of Armenians and Armenian communities in the post-war period were also discussed.
The Maraga 1992: Golgotha of the late 20th Century film was screened.
As the granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, Dr. Sharon Chekijian, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Yale, has long had an interest in her family’s native country. She visited for the first time as a college student in 1991 as part of a summer language program, and learned on her return flight to the United States that the Soviet Union — of which Armenia was then a part — had just collapsed. She was on one of the last planes to leave the country before the collapse.
Ever since, Armenia has been more than a home away from home for Chekijian. Her work in the country has included advising the Armenian medical establishment on how to improve stroke care. And soon she’ll return to the American University of Armenia (AUA), where as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar she’ll help establish an emergency medicine residency program at the school in cooperation with the Armenian Ministry of Heath’s National Institutes of Health over the next three years.
The Fulbright program awards more than 800 fellowships annually to American faculty and higher ed administrators, artists, journalists, scientists, other professionals, and scholars outside of the academy in support of international opportunities. Over the past five decades the program has supported the work of hundreds of Yalies.
Chekijian is grateful for the support. The emergency medicine system in Armenia today, she says, is comparable to that of the United States in the 1960s. “There are no emergency-trained doctors, but there are 700 or so doctors who are working as emergency physicians in the system, some of whom have temporary assignments, such as anesthesia residents,” said Chekijian, who is also medical director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Physician Assistant/Nurse Practitioner Residency Program. “There’s no dedicated emergency medicine training program, but some of the doctors have dedicated their lives to this field.
“The idea behind my project is to make sure that they are up to speed, that they have all of the knowledge that they need, and then to establish them as the faculty members going forward who will teach other people this discipline as part of a more formal training program.”
Since it was established in 1946, the Fulbright Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, has awarded some 8,000 different grants annually to U.S. students, foreign students, and U.S. and foreign visiting scholars. Its U.S. Scholar Program allows educators, researchers, and other professionals to teach, conduct research, or do both in over 135 countries worldwide. Most awards are for a period of two months to one year, and are given on the merits of the research or teaching project.
Since the program’s inception, Fulbright U.S. Scholars from Yale have traveled to such countries as China, Israel, Chile, Ghana, Panama, and New Zealand (to name just a few) to teach or to conduct research in fields as diverse as theater arts, sociology, environmental sciences, law, music, psychology, agriculture, neuroscience, and religious studies. Typically, about three or four Yale faculty members and postdocs win Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards each year.
“Yale’s Fulbright scholars strengthen the university's global engagement and make important contributions to international understanding,” said Pericles Lewis, Yale’s vice president for global strategy and vice provost for academic initiatives. “I encourage faculty and students to consider applying to the Fulbright program.”
For Paul Van Tassel, professor of chemical and environmental engineering and of biomedical engineering in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who has won the Fulbright U.S. Scholar award twice, the opportunity has allowed him to conduct research at two different institutions in France about a dozen years apart.
With his first award, in 2006, Van Tassel spent six months at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, where he was able to work in a laboratory with researchers he had collaborated with briefly as a postdoctoral student in the mid-1990s. His research at that time was focused on fabricating thin polymer films that could be used as coatings for biomedical applications.
“This was really my first time interacting with them as a peer, and it was a wonderful experience,” he said. “Being able to live and work with the team really cemented a relationship between my lab and theirs, and exposed me to many of their interesting projects.”
During his second visit, in 2019, Van Tassel worked in a pharmacology lab at the University of Paris-Saclay, where he researched polymer systems to deliver therapeutic agents. He also had the opportunity to lecture informally and to serve as a mentor to postdoctoral students at the school.
“With these experiences, you of course have the opportunity to interact with colleagues from a different culture,” he said. “But you are also seeing up close the different systems within which these individuals work: how other places manage and administer science and education is really eye opening. Such a perspective helps you not only to develop your own intellectual trajectory, but also to gain a better appreciation of other ways of doing things.”
And the program doesn’t just support faculty. In 2019, Allie Agati, senior associate director of Yale Study Abroad, participated in a Fulbright International Education Administrators seminar, a two-week program designed for staff members at higher education institutions who work in the international education sector to help them connect with societal, cultural, and higher education systems in other countries. As a Fulbright U.S. Scholar, she traveled to South Korea, where she visited more than a dozen universities to learn about the country’s education system.
While her Fulbright experience was not directly related to her daily work advising students on study abroad opportunities in Spain, Latin America, or the Middle East, participating in the program was one of Agati’s own professional development goals. It was her first trip to Korea, and the Fulbright program specifically preferred applicants with no prior experiences in Korea.
“Being able to speak with and learn from those who work in the same field but have a different approach to how they encourage students to seek out their own study abroad opportunities, or support them when they come to their campuses, was really valuable,” she said. “And I appreciated learning more about Korean culture in general.”
Shortly after earning his Ph.D. at Yale last year, Kayhan Nejad, a historian of the Middle East and Russia, flew to Turkey to begin his academic year-long stay as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. He is currently serving as a senior research scholar at the Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Nejad is especially interested in the topic of 20th-century revolutions, comparing those in Russia, Iran, and Turkey, and examining how those three nations have supported each other’s state-building projects. He’d conducted archival research for his dissertation in Moscow as a student, but was unable to travel to the Middle East to conduct research because of the COVID pandemic. His Fulbright award is now giving him the opportunity to investigate Turkish archives as he prepares a monograph for submission to an academic press.
“I’m currently working in the Ottoman archives primarily, and I’m gathering Turkish-, Persian-, and Russian-language documents that are pertinent to the relations of all three states in the early 20th century,” he said. “I’m reconstructing how revolutionaries moved between those states and collaborated with each other.”
In addition to his days conducting research, Nejad, an amateur mountaineer, is also enjoying climbing in Turkey, a hobby that has introduced him to many Turks who share his interest. He has also joined with Turkish neighbors in caring for stray animals in the city.
Likewise, Agati said that her time traveling around Korea and getting to know traditions around food and other cultural aspects of life in the country was a special part of her time there. Learning how the South Koreans handle life in the context of geopolitical tensions with North Korea, she said, was especially illuminating.
For Chekijian, her travels in Armenia have given her an opportunity to see a nation that is still in the process of building itself as an independent state, even as it remains vulnerable to conflict. While her Fulbright award was granted in 2020, she had to postpone her travel to Armenia because of the Nagorno-Karabakh (known to Armenians as Artsakh) war that year, when there was an armed conflict with Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey, over the ethnically Armenian Republic of Artsakh.
“It has been exciting to witness the building of the country,” she said. “I’ve also been lucky to find great partners there with whom to do this deep work of establishing an emergency medicine training program.”
“Traditionally, there is not a lot of money for global health research other than for research about infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and, most recently, COVID,” she added. “Getting support for work in emergency systems development is pretty challenging, so I am very grateful to receive this award.”
The Fulbright U.S. Scholars Program is now accepting applications for the next round of awards. Visit their website for more information. Faculty members with questions may also contact
Armenia and China are strategic partners. Ambassador
21:37, 8 April, 2022
YEREVAN, APRIL 8, ARMENPRESS. Armenia and China are strategic partners, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of China to Armenia Fan Yong told Armenpress within the framework of the conference dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Armenian-Chinese diplomatic relations, assessing the general level of bilateral political relations and trade and economic cooperation 30 years after the establishment of interstate relations.
The Ambassador highly appreciated the fact that two days ago, on April 6, when Yerevan and Beijing were marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and China, the President of the Republic of Armenia Vahagn Khachaturyan visited the new Chinese Embassy in Yerevan, participating in both the diplomatic anniversary and the opening ceremony of the new embassy building.
"We highly appreciate the step of the Armenian President. It shows the great importance that the two sides give to the development of bilateral relations," said Ambassador Fan Yong.
According to the diplomat, during the last 30 years the cooperation between the two countries has been progressing very steadily, which has been getting stronger lately.
"Great importance has been given to the development of peaceful relations between the two countries – diplomatic, political, economic – to all other components, so that they can be further strengthened and developed," said the Ambassador.
The trade and economic relations between Armenia and China, as Ambassador Fan Yong had stated in his article published in "Armenpress", have made significant progress in recent years. According to Chinese government statistics, trade turnover between Armenia and Armenia exceeded $ 1 billion in 2020, growing by 34.8% , and in 2021 bilateral trade reached a new record high of $ 1.4 billion. Thus, Armenia has become China's leading trading partner among the three republics of the South Caucasus.
In this context, Ambassador Fan Yong added that in recent years there has been an increase in Chinese investments in Armenia.
"As you can see, the buses, all those innovative equipment came from China. At the moment, Chinese factories are investing in Armenia's infrastructure, especially in the field of solar energy. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, even in this situation, bilateral trade in 2020 reached $ 1 billion. According to the latest data, bilateral trade has increased by 30%, reaching $ 1.4 billion in 2021. If you check the statistics of the Armenian side, it says that in 2021 the bilateral trade turnover amounted to 1.2 billion dollars, that is, the data of the two sides are very close to each other," the Chinese Ambassador clarified.
Looking at the prospects for the next 30 years of Armenian-Chinese relations, Ambassador Fan Yong says that both countries are very calm and very confident about the future of Armenian-Chinese relations, as those relations have been built on a very solid foundation for the past 30 years.
"We have no doubt about that, because we have the strong will of both sides to develop our future well, we have the aspiration of our leaders for better development, we have peoples who are friends, we have no problem in politics, we do not have any problems or disagreements regarding the development of the economy. I want to say that our relations are mutually beneficial, we are useful to each other," the Chinese Ambassador to Armenia told Armenpress.
16:52, 6 April, 2022
YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. The European Broadcasting Union confirmed that the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 will be held in Armenia on Sunday 11 December. The date chosen is no coincidence, as it avoids coinciding with the final of the World Cup in Qatar, ESC Plus reported.
This festival will follow in the wake of Maléna’s sensational victory in Paris with her whirlwind of a song Qami Qami.
“It is an honour to host the 20th edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in Yerevan, one of the oldest and most iconic cities in the world.
We are excited to work together with the EBU and our public service media partners across Europe to create an unforgettable journey for our young talents and a cutting-edge TV show for millions of viewers around the world.
We will spare no effort to ensure we create magic for the young participants and viewers, and we look forward to welcoming them all to Yerevan later this year.”
This will be the second time Yerevan has hosted the Contest, having done so in 2011, after Vladimir Arzumanyan won the previous year with his song Mama. In fact, Armenia is one of the most successful countries in the history of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, having participated 14 times and never finished lower than ninth place.
A commitment to showmanship that Martin Österdahl, Executive Supervisor of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, highlights:
“Armenia’s brilliant, stylish and contemporary winning song set a new standard for Junior Eurovision, and we have no doubt that excellence will be reflected in the quality of the show that AMPTV is producing in this special anniversary year.
We look forward to working with our colleagues in Armenia, and can’t wait for them to show the unprecedented enthusiasm and passion we know Yerevan has for Junior Eurovision”.
16:06, 4 April, 2022
YEREVAN, APRIL 4, ARMENPRESS. First President of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan held a meeting with the Russian Ambassador to Armenia Sergey Kopyrkin.
Ter-Petrosyan’s spokesperson Arman Musinyan said in a statement that the meeting took place at the first president’s home and “on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Russia”.
“The conversation proceeded around the prospects of development of the Armenian-Russian relations,” Musinyan added.