15:04, 2 August 2023
YEREVAN, AUGUST 2, ARMENPRESS. Yerevan will host the IBA Junior World Boxing Championships in November-December 2023.
The upcoming event was announced by Arayik Harutyunyan, Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“80-100 countries will send their teams to our capital. We have hopes of many medals from our young athletes given their excellent results at the European championships,” Harutyunyan said in a Facebook post.
13:09,
YEREVAN, JULY 24, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan has met with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Tehran, IRNA news agency reported.
The foreign ministers discussed the development of bilateral cooperation, as well as relevant regional and international issues.
A joint press conference is expected to take place.
16:14,
YEREVAN, JULY 24, ARMENPRESS. The foreign ministers of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan will hold a trilateral meeting on July 25 in Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will also hold separate bilateral talks with the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers.
09:36,
YEREVAN, JULY 24, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will travel to Tehran on July 24 to meet with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Armenian foreign ministry announced Monday.
“On July 24, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a visit to Tehran. The meeting of Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Iran is scheduled. It will be followed by statements for the press,” foreign ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan said in a statement on social media.
Whether we know it or not, all of us are investors. Whether we are in the stock market or have another financial interest, all of us are involved in some kind of investment. The question is: Where do we invest? After we take care of the basics of food, shelter and clothing, where do we invest our time and substance? Certainly, where we invest tells what we are really interested in and where we think life’s best values are.
As for investments, money is not one’s most important investment. The pursuit of a meaningful life is more important than money. The people you love are more important than money as a long-term investment.
Although many people invest in material things, there are others who invest in intellectual, cultural and spiritual values. These types of investments are very important and life-changing. Below are some of them.
Investment in the family. Since the dawn of creation, the time of the very first family, God has chosen to trust earthly, frail human parents with the task of raising their children and molding their character. Undoubtedly, the well-being of a nation and its institutions is dependent on the integrity of its families.
We can invest in creating and strengthening the family by strengthening the ties of communication among family members. We can encourage parents and children to spend more time at home and maintain family unity through loyalty. Above all, we can help the family by enabling its members to surrender their lives to God.
Investment in knowledge and letting knowledge ripen to wisdom. The pursuit of knowledge is very important to society’s development. Knowledge is information that one possesses, whereas wisdom is good judgment or discernment for what is true and right, and one’s ability to put knowledge to good use.
In an age of increased specialization, our society needs people who will strive to cultivate the human side of their nature just as they push their mental horizons – people who educate their hearts as much as their heads. Thus, we must invest in education and Christian education for the sake of a sound and solid community life. Such an investment cannot be stolen, cannot be destroyed by fire and storms, and can never go bankrupt.
Investment in culture. Every nation is characterized by its culture. Culture is the physical, social and spiritual heritage of a people at a given time or over all time. It is the total body of material artifacts, works of art, collective, mental and spiritual ideas, beliefs, customs and values transmitted from generation to generation.
In all cultures, there is a multiplicity of elements, such as language, drama, architecture, painting, music and dancing. Sometimes if one of these elements is lost, the culture can survive on the strength of other elements. It is the cultural totality that preserves the culture of a people.
We are called to commit ourselves to the survival of our culture by preserving and perpetuating our heritage through our moral and financial support.
Investment in church. The church plays a very important role in the lives of people. Civilization depends upon its religious beliefs and convictions. No other institution can replace the church in cultivating and implementing the religious convictions needed in the civilizing process. The church offers the opportunity to worship God as revealed through Jesus Christ. It offers the opportunity to impart religious education for all ages. It also offers the opportunity to belong to a community of support and service.
We can invest in the church by our regular presence and participation, by recruiting others, and by our financial and moral support.
Investment in a good name. The Bible says, “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches” (Proverbs 22:1). A good name is synonymous with good character. It is more important than all the college degrees, public titles or knowledge that one might accumulate in a lifetime. It is the one thing over which every adult has total, personal control in virtually all circumstances. It may be what others, friends and even foes, will remember about us more than anything else.
Building character is not an easy task; it is not something that can be accomplished overnight. It is a life-long endeavor to study, learn, emulate and practice. It is to be learned from literature and especially from the book of life, the Bible. It is to emulate the greatest master, Jesus Christ Himself.
Investment in a personal experience of being in tune with God. Truth becomes effective and convincing at the level of personal experience. There is no substitute for personal experience. Having a personal experience with God is the most important investment. Jesus, the ultimate investment counselor says, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man gives you.” Jesus taught that the most basic investment of our lives is our commitment to God. He put it in these words, “Seek first His Kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). He summed up this whole matter of what we invest ourselves in with two searching questions: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul” (Mark 8:36-37). All of us are dealing with these questions daily, either consciously or unconsciously, as we build the investment portfolio of our lives and choose those things in which we invest our substance and ourselves.
The European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights has joined the International Court of Justice in reaffirming its order compelling Azerbaijan to open the Lachin Corridor and end the Artsakh blockade.
The ECHR said on Monday that after reviewing a request from Armenia to apply interim measures against Azerbaijan regarding unblocking of the Lachin Corridor, the court decided to reaffirm its ruling of December 21 that calls on Baku to open the road.
The December 21 ruling ordered Azerbaijan to ‘take all measures’ to ensure safe passage through the “Lachin Corridor” of seriously ill persons in need of medical treatment in Armenia and others who were stranded on the road without shelter or means of subsistence.
With Monday’s decision, the European Court of Human Rights reaffirmed the need of implementing the decision made of December 21, 2022 in the current situation, and it must be implemented by Azerbaijan.
Earlier this month, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations highest judicial body, also reaffirmed its ruling of February 21, ordering Baku to take all steps to ensure the “unimpeded movement” along the Lachin Corridor.
Despite international calls, Baku has refused to comply by these orders.
In the past two weeks much of the world’s attention was on France. The wave of protests and violence, which shattered several major cities, was sparked by the murder of a 17-year old by the police. The incident also brought up underlying problems in France’s suburbs, discrimination against immigrant populations, and widespread accusations of racism within France’s security branches.
Although many reactions from the external world focused on concerns and calls for confronting the reasons behind social tensions, statements from Turkey and Iran took a hard line against the French government. Both countries emphasized “institutional racism” as part of France’s political culture and its colonialist past.
French daily Le Figaro addressed the subject in an interview with a prominent scholar, Prof Hamit Bozarslan. Author of the book “Anti-democracy in the 21st century – Iran, Russia, Turkey,” Bozarslan is a historian, political scientist and director of studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Below is a shortened version of the interview, translated from the French by FTP.
Iran and Turkey have criticized events in France. Erdoğan castigated the institutional racism of our country; Iran criticized the “discriminatory” relations maintained by the French State “with the immigrant population.” Are you surprised by these positions?
No, not at all. To tell the truth, I was even surprised by the moderate tone that China adopted compared to others. Iran and Turkey propagate the idea that Muslims in France are about to suffer genocide and that the French police will show great brutality towards them.
In Anti-democracy in the 21st century – Iran, Russia, Turkey [CNRS editions, 2021], I wrote that “anti-democracy” rhetoric continues to desecrate democracies, to present them as countries where chaos reigns, where justice is non-existent and above all unfair to Muslims. They transform this into an ontological identity question. The West is presented as a danger not only for Muslim communities but also for Islam as such. This is a constant that has been observed for a very long time.
What objectives are Ankara and Tehran pursuing? Are they part of diplomacy, of domestic politics?
Their objectives are justified by their raison d’être, but in Turkey it does not work. The situation is such, despite Erdogan’s electoral victory, that there are no more landmarks in society and no longer any trust in the system.
In Iran, this anti-Western feeling that the regime wants to feed also tends to disappear. This is seen, for example, during the last demonstrations organized by the Iranian government against the “Women, life, freedom!” movement, which mobilized only a few hundred people aged 60 to 70. Internally, therefore, I do not have the impression that these statements can arouse enthusiasm on the part of the population.
But this says a lot about the ideology and identity of these regimes, their vision of the world and their ability to justify their raison d’être and imagine a world in total chaos.
Erdoğan’s words can be linked to the words of Steve Bannon, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump’s far-right advisor: they both describe a world in total chaos, and collapsing; a world where democratic spaces have become places of absolute savagery. For some it is because of immigrants, for others because of power. In short, they define democracies not from their institutional functioning, from the rule of law, but from this risk of absolute collapse.
How can we explain that Tehran says “we recommend the French government and the police pay attention to the demands of the demonstrators while showing restraint and avoiding all violence” when repression in Iran is still bloody?
We saw repression in Iran, with the movement in 2022, but also in 2019 and 2014. And in Turkey with full prisons and the LGBT movement repressed on the occasion of the Pride March.
The United States, France and Great Britain have said that a disproportionate force should not be used towards demonstrators in Iran. And Iran and Turkey are using` a similar rhetoric to create a kind of equalization. It’s as if all these powers were on the same level: you give us lessons, we give you lessons. It’s a way to give them back the change of their coin.
Are Turkey and Iran trying in mirror to present themselves as models of democracy?
These countries want to present themselves as havens of peace and stability. Since in other countries such demonstrations may exist, Turkey and Iran try to present themselves as stable in contrast and able to guarantee the safety of their citizens.
These regimes do not consider that they conduct a campaign of stigmatization and repression against their opponents, and instead present themselves as a superior alternative, by far, to democracy.
They also represent themselves as spaces where human rights are respected, as non-repressive regimes. There is a kind of inversion and total perversion of the data.
Turkey claims that France has a problem with its colonial past. However, Turkey is also a country that has a problem with its minorities and its past. How can Erdoğan justify this kind of speech?
For Erdoğan, in Islam there is no genocide; it does not exist in the Koran. But genocide exists elsewhere, so the colonial past is a genocidal past for the Turks.
What is happening in Palestine is also a genocidal repression, according to the Turkish President. And he says that Muslims in Europe are threatened in their very existence. He analyzes the world based on what is Islamic and what is not; human rights are only defined on the basis of this criterion of religious affiliation.
There is on one side the “oppressed Islam,” and this colonial past of part of the democracies – especially Great Britain and France – which continues today with repression against Muslims. On the other hand, there is Islam in which there is no repression or genocide.
Turkey considers that it has no problem with its past in relation to minorities such as Armenians or Jews (while there were very brutal anti-Semitic campaigns in 1933-1934 in Turkey). The history of the world is therefore reduced for these countries to a confrontation between on the one hand a “collective West” that would be anti-Muslim, and on the other this entity and religion always oppressed by this collective West: Islam.
You mention Russia, but Dimitri Medvedev also had similar remarks against France. How to explain this unanimity? What unites Russia, Turkey and Iran?
What brings them together is first and foremost an absolute identity definition of the nation: their nation has a pure ontology, but it is threatened by impure, corrupting ontologies that come from outside.
This is the construction of the collective West—the term is frequently used in Russia and Turkey—there are no longer differences between the different Western countries for them, and they make a totally falsified reading of history.
For Russia, the history of the world is the history of the world’s war against Russia, the First World War is not a European war but the war of the destruction of Russia by Europe; the Second World War is the war of the West against Russia. We find a similar perception in Turkey, where we see in the First World War a destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the West.
Turkish official historiography forgets that the Ottoman Empire went to war on its own without any provocation and that it was the ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. There is therefore a falsification of history that creates this image of the world.
But this story no longer operates today, even though it was able to walk in the past – in the 1980s in Iran, in the 2000s in Russia. From now on, this speech is totally worn out, but still repeated.
You wrote about “decivilization”. Do you observe this process at work? Is it more marked in France than in Turkey and Iran?
It is obvious that there are structural problems in France that are not new, these problems work in favor of extremely massive economic crises, the violence that appears on these occasions can become systemic. But it is a violence that does not find mediation, that does not lead to a structuring of the social space, which has no intermediary.
There is a protest movement that can be extremely violent, which is subject to extremely serious structural problems. And we can observe similar events in other countries, such as in Great Britain in Manchester and Birmingham, in Sweden – although it has no colonial history – in Malmö and Gothenburg.
There is a recurring phenomenon that questions democracies and their structural problems. Democracies have made a lot of progress over the last 50 years in terms of freedom, but there has been no progress in terms of equality, status or income.
However, I do not believe that we can speak of a problem of decivilization, a phenomenon that rather concerns countries like Syria, where the state had collapsed and had become a country where a predatory militia coexisting with other predatory militias; where society has been annihilated in the true sense of the word.
But in the case of France the term seems to me quite excessive. I would also not use it in the context of Iran or Turkey; on the other hand, the First World War in Iran and Turkey corresponded to a process of decivilization, and the Armenian genocide, which was also the genocide of other Christian communities, constituted the paroxysmal degree of this process.
https://freeturkishpress.com/2023/07/09/turkey-iran-define-western-democracies-as-chaos-prof-hamit-bozarslan/
YEREVAN, July 11. /TASS/. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov suggested holding the Innoprom exhibition in fall 2024 in Armenia at the meeting of the industrial policy council of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) said on its website on Tuesday.
"Relevant ministers of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia supported the Commission’s initiative to diffuse the practice of staging the Innoprom industrial exhibitions in EAEU countries. The new event staged in series in the Eurasian format in each country may become a central, a milestone show of EAEU’s industrial achievements. Russian Deputy Prime Minister – Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov suggested holding the Innoprom in fall in 2024 in Armenia," EEC said.
Such exhibitions will provide an impetus to an increase in cooperative supplies, improve the image of the Eurasian industry, and will promote creation of joint ventures, participants in the meeting concur.
The esteemed conductor will lead the orchestra in concert series on July 12 & 13 that celebrates Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday.
YEREVAN, ARMENIA, July 4, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Sergey Smbatyan, the esteemed Armenian conductor, is proud to announce that he will lead the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra in a special concert series dedicated to commemorating the 150th birthday of the legendary composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. The concert series will occur on July 12 and 13 at the renowned Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall in Yerevan, Armenia.
Sergey Smbatyan, the Founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, is renowned for his exceptional artistry and leadership. As the Principal Conductor of the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Smbatyan has also garnered international acclaim for his transformative interpretations and innovative programming.
The Armenian State Symphony Orchestra will showcase Rachmaninoff's exquisite compositions in this extraordinary concert series. On July 12, the orchestra will perform Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op.1 and Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30. On July 13, the program will include Piano Concerto No. 4, The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, and Piano Concerto No. 2.
"It is an incredibly moving experience to lead the highly acclaimed Armenian State Symphony Orchestra in celebrating Sergei Rachmaninoff's 150th birthday with these monumental masterworks,” said Sergey Smbatyan. “We aim to deliver an unforgettable musical experience, capturing Rachmaninoff's compositions' profound beauty and emotional depth."
The Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, renowned for its spirited performances and commitment to cultural awareness, seeks to bring the rich heritage of classical music to audiences worldwide. Sergey Smbatyan's artistic vision and the orchestra's unwavering dedication have resulted in numerous critically acclaimed performances, captivating audiences with passion and musical excellence.
Sergey Smbatyan is committed to promoting the arts in Armenia and developing young musicians. In 2019, he established the “Music for Future” Cultural Foundation intending to promote classical music education in Armenia and provide young musicians with opportunities to develop their talents.
The latest initiative of the “Music for Future” Foundation is the Donation-Concert of the scholars, which will be broadcast LIVE on the Foundation’s Facebook page on July 11 at 08:00 p.m.
Through its various programs and initiatives, Foundation is helping to create a new generation of talented musicians who have the potential to become cultural ambassadors for Armenia.
To learn more about Sergey Smbatyan and upcoming performances, visit https://sergeysmbatyan.com.
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