Armenian Public TV starts the new season on Monday, September 7 with the launching of a number of new and fresh programs and interesting projects.
Committed to its long-term traditions, the Public TV will offer educational-cultural, entertaining, social and cognitive, patriotic programs, as well as new feature films and documentary series.
OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will hold a meeting of Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers in September to discuss organizing a presidential meeting this year.
“The co-chairs will bring the foreign ministers together on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September. We will discuss with the ministers the possibility of holding the next presidential summit later this year,” James Warlick, the U.S. representative to the OSCE Minsk Group, told AzerNews.
Commenting on the recent escalation of tension along the contact line of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops, Warlick said the co-chairs continue to propose confidence-building measures for ensuring the ceasefire regime.
“For most of the year, the situation along the Line of Contact and Armenia-Azerbaijan border has been relatively stable. We have appealed to the sides to reduce tensions and strictly respect the ceasefire. We also continue to propose confidence-building measures that would reinforce the ceasefire, creating a more positive environment for negotiations that could lead to a settlement,” Warlick said.
Polar bears are unable to adapt their behaviour to cope with the food losses associated with warmer summers in the Arctic, according to a report by the BBC.
Scientists had believed that the animals would enter a type of ‘walking hibernation’ when deprived of prey.
But new research says that that bears simply starve in hotter conditions when food is scarce.
The authors say that the implications for the survival of the species in a warmer world are grim.
Polar bears survive mainly on a diet of seals that they hunt on the sea ice – but increased melting in the summer reduces seal numbers and as a result the bears struggle to find a meal.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan arrived in Ufa today to participate in the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Armenia has bid for an observer’s status in the organization.
July 8-10 Ufa hosts the summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. This year Russia presides over both.
The Islamic State has caused a huge damage to civilization over the past year of its activity and aims to cleanse the region of Christians, experts of Arabic studies Sargis Grigoryan and Armen Petrosyan told a press conference today.
The Islamic State has managed to expand the areas under in control in Iraq and Syria. This is a new reality for the world, since ISIS has set a new benchmark for radicals. The latters’ activity will now serve the Islamic State.
Sargis Grigoryan said “immediately after the Islamic State was proclaimed, a number of Islamist structures in the Muslim world vowed their loyalty to the Caliph. This was followed by establishment of vilayets in areas controlled by those organizations.
“At this point there are about 35 vilayets in different parts of the Muslim world – from North Africa to Pakistan,” he said.
The last announcement was about the creation of a vilayet in the Caucasus. According to the expert, this means “IS has far-reaching plans connected with this stricture in the region. The Islamic organizations in the Caucasus will receive military, financial and other assistance from the Islamic State.”
“I think the radical Islamist trends will further intensify, as the radical Islamic groups need to prove they are worth being “administrative units” of ISIS,” Grigoryan said.
Armen Petrosyan spoke about the way different regional players use the IS factor for their geopolitical interests. “If there is any provocation in the Caucasus, i.e. the South of Russia, it will be enough for the world to speak about the reinforcement of ISIS positions in Russia,” he said.
“This will mean a serious blow to Russia, which will make the country redirect a huge portion of its resources from Ukraine to the Caucasus,” Petrosyan added.
He said the developments are even more alarming, considering that there are a great number of Armenians living in those regions.
Critics said he was too ugly, too short and had a terrible voice. Fifty-one albums later, Charles Aznavour is a living legend. The 91-year-old French crooner talks Edith Piaf, Kim Kardashian and plastic surgery.
Angelique Chrisafis
Charles Aznavour, one of the greatest singer-songwriters France has ever known, sits in a velvet armchair a few days before his 91st birthday, discussing the whiff of ladies’ armpits.
A song on his new album, in which he declares, “I love the smell of your underarms,” worried his Swedish wife of 50 years, but Aznavour knows his audience. If he’s the most successful French crooner in the world – a lyricist who defined the country’s popular culture for decades – it’s precisely because his songs have always been risky.
When Aznavour began writing in the 1940s, sex was something that happened with the light off. It was OK for women singers to howl over their broken hearts, but men didn’t sing about their own emotional despair – and later their dodgy prostates. Aznavour shone a spotlight on masculinity and libido, singing about depression, sex, prejudice and rape. His hits ranged from the 1970s story of a gay transvestite in What Makes a Man, to the once-banned ballad of muggy, post-coital exhaustion, Après l’Amour, and the controversial You’ve Let Yourself Go – the plea of a man whose wife has grown dowdy and fat (“I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there”).
He is unrepentant. “It’s a kind of sickness I have, talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about. I started with homosexuality and I wanted to break every taboo.” The armpit line comes in a new ballad about a blind lover’s sense of smell. “When I wrote a song about the deaf [Quiet Love], I learned sign-language to perform it on stage. On this album, I wanted to describe what it was like for someone non-sighted.” He pauses. “I still don’t know how I’m going to perform it …” In his shows, he takes on various personas with dramatic gestures that resemble a mime act. He’s an actor who sings rather than a Frank Sinatra-style singer who acts.
Aznavour is still composing and performing, he’s written around 1,200 songs and sold more than 100m records in his 70-year career. France worships him as the last living legend of a golden era. Like many popular singers who came to represent the very essence of France – such as Georges Moustaki and, to a certain extent, Edith Piaf herself – Aznavour is shaped by his foreign roots. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris to an actor-father and singer-mother who had fled the Armenian genocide, he left school and became a child actor at the age of nine. He survived the German occupation of Paris singing in cabarets, while his parents hid fellow Armenians, Jews, Russians and Communists in their apartment and his father joined the resistance.
But Aznavour’s path to success was long and torturous. French critics dismissed him as repulsively ugly, too short, with a terrible voice and dubious song titles. It wasn’t until the end of the 50s, a decade after Piaf had taken him on as her songwriter, flatmate and all-round bag-carrier that he finally began to make it. In 1960, he played the shy and haunted piano-player in François Truffaut’s classic New Wave film, Shoot the Piano Player (he went on to act in over 60 films). But his global singing fame was cemented in the 70s with a triumphant crossover into the US and UK – something he puts down to the excellent translation of his lyrics into English. (The bittersweet British No 1, She, is hardly known in France). Britain was seduced by this scrawny Frenchman crooning about painful crushes in a 10-ton accent. “I often say: ‘France is for lyrics, England is for music’,” he muses.
Nowadays, Aznavour is a “dinosaur” – his word – who trades on agelessness. His 51st studio album is out in the UK now and he is working on his 52nd. He loves being sampled by adoring French rappers. He relishes the irony that at 30 he was considered ugly, but past 90 he is now seen as dashing. What it’s like being 91? “I wouldn’t have a clue,” he says, wide-eyed. “I don’t feel 91. I’ve always thought a person must never lose the gaze of a child.” At 5-foot-3, he holds his tiny frame perpetually taut (keeping his shoulders straight is one his secrets of eternal youth). But he’s brutally honest about performing on stage. “I hide nothing from the audience,” he says. He tells them he has an Auto-cue because his memory is fading, and says his mouth ulcers make it hard to sing. He relies on hearing aids. But he loathes what he calls the show-business “cult of youth”.
“More and more men are changing themselves, having surgery, and you can see it on TV, because their dyed-black hair turns blue under the lights,” he says. “I had a problem with my nose, I got it done. I made some white hair that was falling out grow back. But I left my wrinkles where they are. And I look younger than the others because I have never retouched nature’s work.”
In fact, it was Edith Piaf cabaret superstar and queen of chanson française, who forced Aznavour to have a nose job 50 years ago. She pestered him for months to fix what she deemed his too-large hooter. He eventually went under the knife, and presented himself for inspection. “I preferred you before,” she said.
There’s a song about Piaf on the new album. It is the first time he has written about her, though they lived together – platonically – for eight years. “We were like cousins. We had this extraordinary complicity. I never had a love affair with her – that’s what saved us.” Why did Piaf, the star, latch on to him, an unknown nine years her junior? “I brought her my youth, my madness, she loved my whole jazzy side.”
His other main role today is as one of the world’s most famous Armenians. He has finally taken dual Armenian citizenship, is Armenian ambassador to Switzerlandand travelled with the French president François Hollande to mark the centenary of the Armenian genocide this year. But France still defines his identity. “I’ve always felt totally French. That really vexed the Armenians in Armenia, but now they’re used to it.” He politely declines to say what he thinks about his challenger as pop culture’s international symbol of the Armenian diaspora: Kim Kardashian. He’s never met her. Does he watch her reality show? “I can’t say anything about it, because I would anger half the Armenians.” He laughs nervously. “I suppose Armenians are quite prudish and don’t like too much nudity …”
A few years ago, he caused shockwaves in France by saying he’d paid backhanders to figures on all sides of the political spectrum after being told he was facing a tax inspection, presumed to have been in the 1970s. A later tax investigation found no irregularity. Decades ago, he left France to live just over the border in Switzerland. “I was never a tax exile,” he is at pains to point out. “I didn’t have a penny when I left.”
The phrase Aznavour probably hates the most is “farewell tour”. He swears he has never uttered the words, and vows to keep performing until he dies.
“You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served,” he once crooned. But with audiences still dishing up a never-ending pot of it, he’s happy to stick around.
On June 2 the first resident-Ambassador of Japan to Armenia Eiji Taguchi handed over the copies of his credentials to Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian.
Congratulating the Ambassador on the occasion of his appointment and wishing him a fruitful activity, Minister Nalbandian attached importance to the opening of the diplomatic mission of Japan in Yerevan. Minister Nalbandian expressed hope that the opening of the mission would give a new impetus to the development of bilateral relations. Edward Nalbandian expressed gratitude for Japan’s continued support to Armenia since the independence.
Thanking for the reception and wishes, Ambassador Eiji Taguchi reassured that would exert maximum efforts for the strengthening and deepening of bilateral friendly relations.
During the meeting the sides touched upon a wide range of issues related to the Armenian-Japanese agenda, attached importance to the development of parliamentary ties, discussed the steps taken to deepen trade and economic cooperation, exchanged views on the strengthening of interaction within the International organizations as well as holding political consultations between Foreign Ministries.
Minister Nalbandian expressed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ support to the newly established Embassy of Japan in the implementation of its mission.
By Harut Sassounian
The California Courier
In a lengthy article titled, “10 members of Congress took trip secretly funded by foreign government,” The Washington Post disclosed last week the scandalous details of an all-expenses paid trip to a conference in Azerbaijan by 10 lawmakers and 32 staff members in 2013. Former top aides to Pres. Obama — Robert Gibbs, Jim Messina and David Plough – also attended the conference as guest speakers.
The organizer of the international oil gathering in Baku, SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, funneled $750,000 through two U.S. nonprofit organizations “to conceal the source of the funding” for the trip, according to a confidential Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report obtained by The Washington Post. Another $750,000 was contributed by British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips and KBR for airfare, hotel and gifts.
The newspaper also reported that “shortly before the May 28-29, 2013 conference, SOCAR and several large energy companies [including the National Iranian Oil Company] sought exemptions for a $28 billion natural gas pipeline in the Caspian Sea from U.S. economic sanctions being imposed on Iran.” In fact, a month before the conference, SOCAR established the nonprofit Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ) in Houston by transferring $750,000. The second nonprofit involved in the scheme, also based in Houston, was the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians (TCAE). Both nonprofits, headed by Kemal Oksuz, shared the same Houston address. Congress approved several bills sanctioning Iran, while exempting the SOCAR project. Pres. Obama then signed these bills into law.
The ten members of Congress who went on the Baku junket were: Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Danny Davis (D-IL), Michelle Grisham (D- NM), Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Ted Poe (R-TX), and Steve Stockman (R-TX).
Ethics investigators disclosed that these lawmakers, accompanied by spouses and fiancés, received several gifts, including “crystal tea sets, briefcases, silk scarves, turquoise earrings, gold-painted plates and Azerbaijani rugs…. All lawmakers received at least one rug and some got two, one prayer-size and one area rug. Many staff members also received rugs.”
To justify their illegal or improper actions, some of these lawmakers made ridiculous statements to congressional investigators:
— Cong. Davis stated that during the Baku conference he “received one rug which was delivered to his hotel room.” He said he was thinking about donating the rug to a museum or charity!
— Cong. Hinojosa claimed: “I received souvenirs of what I believed to be of minimal value and in compliance with the House Gift rule.”
— Ladan Ahmadi, spokeswoman for Rep. Meeks, stated that the Congressman “understood the rug to be a permissible courtesy gift.”
— A senior staff member of Rep. Lance told The Washington Post that the Congressman “returned the one rug he received after he got back to Washington. The staff member also said Lance received a pair of earrings and reimbursed the nonprofit group that helped organize the conference $100 immediately upon returning to New Jersey.”
— Cong. Grisham told ethics investigators that she did not disclose the rugs because she did not think they were particularly valuable. She also thought they were unattractive: “It’s not a carpet I would have purchased.”
— Cong. Bridenstine was the only lawmaker who disclosed the rugs on his financial report. “He had them appraised: the smaller rug at $2,500 and the larger at $3,500.”
Quoting from the ethics report, The Washington Post revealed that Reps. Clarke, Grisham, Hinojosa, Lance, and their staff members also “took side trips to Turkey, traveling to Istanbul, Ankara or both…. The Bosphorus Atlantic Cultural Association of Friendship and Cooperation, a Turkish nonprofit organization, covered the expenses, the report said. The lawmakers did not disclose the role of that nonprofit.”
The Office of Congressional Ethics concluded that “SOCAR and AFAZ provided gifts in the form of impermissible travel expenses to congressional travelers in violation of House rules, regulations and federal law,” while “members of Congress who traveled to Turkey accepted payment of travel expenses from impermissible sources, resulting in an impermissible gift, in violation of House rules and regulations.” Furthermore, the investigators reported that five nonprofits affiliated with the Azerbaijani government asserted that they sponsored the conference, filing sworn statements with the Ethics Committee in April and May 2013. “The five sponsoring organizations contributed no funding for the congressional travel in spite of false affirmations on the forms they submitted to the Committee on Ethics.” The Washington Post reported that these findings have been referred to the House Ethics Committee for investigation of possible violation of congressional rules and federal laws that bar foreign governments from trying to influence U.S. policy.
It is deeply troubling that members of Congress are willing to sell their souls to corrupt Azerbaijani and Turkish entities for a free rug!
Tigran Sargsyan: GDP/external foreign debt index totaled 26% by end of 2009
May 22, 2010 – 15:51 AMT 10:51 GMT
PanARMENIAN.Net –
Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan said that the Armenian
government has managed to receive credit funds from donor
organizations to implement anti-crisis programs.
Presenting the annual report on the state budget fulfillment in 2009,
the Prime Minister said that the World Bank Armenia allocated $350mln
in 2009.
Meanwhile, $500mln was invested in Armenia’s economy through the
International Monetary Fund.
Besides, $80mln was received from the Asian Development Bank as a
budgetary assistance.
An agreement was reached with the European Union on provision of a
budgetary assistance at the amount of 100mln euros.
In addition, $500mln was attracted from Russia to finance anti-crisis events.
"Thus, the GDP/foreign state debt index totaled 36% by the end of 2009
against 13.2% in 2008. Meanwhile, it provided with the opportunity to
implement business cycle policy of the Armenian government," Mr.
Sargsyan said.
GEORGIAN EMBASSY IN ARMENIA NEITHER CONFIRMS NOR REFUTES EXISTENCE OF CITIZEN MARDUN GUMASHYAN
Arminfo.
2010-05-20 14:31:00
ArmInfo. The Georgian Embassy in Armenia neither confirms nor refutes
existence of the citizen Mardun Gumashyan. In late April Azerbaijani
media reported that Mardun Gumashyan is complicit in organization
of mass murder at the Oil Academy. Although Gumashyan is a citizen
of Georgia, the Azerbaijani special services tried their best to
"reveal Armenian roots" of the tragedy.
ArmInfo’s request to the Georgian Embassy in Armenia to verify the
existence of Mardun Gumashyan (1951) residing (or registered) in
the village of Shulaver, Marneul region, Georgia. In response, the
diplomatic representation of Georgia refused to provide any data on
a private person, referring to the legislation of Georgia. In fact,
it is still questionable if the "organizer" of the bloodshed at the
Baku Oil Academy exists or not.
In addition, on April 30 the Azerbaijani media reported that Gumashyan
is on the Interpol wanted list. But, Interpol has not put Gumashyan
on the wanted list yet.
To recall, the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy shooting occurred on
April 30, 2009. A total of 12 people were killed (students and staff
members including the Deputy Principal of the institution) by an armed
assailant and several others were wounded. Responsible employees of
special task police unit, district police and prosecutor’s offices
immediately arrived at the site. Seeing he will be rendered harmless
by the police the criminal committed suicide. He was identified as
the Georgian citizen Gadirov Farda Asad, 29. The General Prosecutor’s
Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs established operational
investigative group and most of the persons contacted with Gadirov
were brought to justice: Amirov Javidan Farman Aliyev Nadir Shirkhan,
Suleymanov Najaf Novruz, Gabulov Ariz Zahid.