Deutsche Presse-Agentur
July 20, 2017 Thursday 9:53 AM EST
Azerbaijan jails travel blogger for 3 years for trip to disputed land
DPA POLITICS Azerbaijan conflict Armenia Azerbaijan jails travel
blogger for 3 years for trip to disputed land Moscow
A court in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan
sentenced Russian travel blogger Alexander Lapshin on Thursday to
three years in prison for visiting the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
The region, which comprises about 4,500 square kilometres within
predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan, is controlled by Christian Armenian
separatists. Azerbaijan and neighbouring Armenia have fought over the
land for decades.
Lapshin, who also has Israeli and Ukrainian citizenship, was found
guilty of crossing into the region from the Armenian side without
Azerbaijan's authorization. He was detained in Belarus last year and
extradited to Azerbaijan.
Kirk Kerkorian’s investment firm sells property and assets
10:11, 21.07.2017
Late American-Armenian millionaire Kirk Kerkorian's Tracinda Corp investment firm has been slowly walking away from Las Vegas, as directed by his will.
In addition to recently selling down its stake in MGM Resorts, the company Kerkorian founded, Tracinda recently unloaded a condo unit at the luxurious
Mandarin Oriental. Purchased in 2010 for $3.6 million, the selling price was just $2 million, casino.org reported.
Tracinda Corp is named after Kerkorian’s two daughters, Tracy and Linda. The directive to dissolve Tracinda’s holdings in MGM and sell off other assets stems from Kerkorian’s decision to leave most of his estimated $4 billion fortune to charitable endeavors.
The well-known Armenian-American businessman and philanthropist Kirk Kerkorian died at the age of 98 in 2015.
ArmInfo. Neutralizng the terrorist who committed the murder of tourists in Egyptian Hurghada on July 14, turned possible with the help of a wounded citizen of Armenia, who struck the criminal on the head with a chaise-longue.
According to the press secretary of the Armenian Foreign Ministry Tigran Balayan, one of the Armenian women who suffered as a result of the attack has already undergone surgery and is in a state of moderate severity, placed in the intensive care unit. The second victim is getting ready for discharge from the hospital.
The victims of the attack on foreign tourists in Egyptian Hurghada were two German nationals. Several people were wounded, including two Armenian citizens and one Russian woman. The attacker was detained, he was interrogated in order to establish the motives for the crime. According to preliminary information, the attacking tourists entered the hotel's private beach from a public beach nearby.
The man who stabbed two German citizens in the Egyptian resort city of Hurghada acted on the orders of the Daesh terror group (outlawed in Russia), German media reported on Saturday, according to Sputnik agency.
To remind, on Friday the man, wielding a knife, attacked the guests of a Hurghada hotel at the beach and killed two women from Germany, according to Egypt's Red Sea Governorate head. Four others tourists were injured.
The assailant was a member of the Daesh and was in contact with other terrorists, the DPA news agency reported, citing a source in Egyptian security services. The attacker is believed to be a student from northern Egypt.
The information has not been officially confirmed by the Egyptian authorities.
ARMINFO News Agency, Armenia
Friday
July 14 in Yerevan will premiere the film Tatyana Danilyants "Six
musicians against the backdrop of the city"
Yerevan July 14
David Stepanyan. On July 14 at 19.00 in the big hall of the Moscow
cinema "Moscow" within the framework of the fourteenth international
film festival "Golden Apricot" the Yerevan premiere of the documentary
Tatyana Danilyants "Six musicians against the background of the city"
will take place, the press service of the RCSC reports.
Six outstanding Armenian musicians, six musical styles, six personal
stories against one of the most important musical capitals of the
former Soviet Union, Yerevan. After the collapse of the USSR, after
surviving wars, the time of "darkness" and almost total isolation, in
the new millennium the city is looking for its place in the world, its
purpose, its identity.
The winner of the Grammy Award and the World Music Award, the creator
of the legendary Armenian Navy Band Artaud Tunchbodzhyan, the voice
and spirit of the duduk Jivan Gasparyan, and other wonderful film
participants, they are the geniuses of the place of Yerevan. They talk
and sing about their beloved city, revealing its beauty and hidden
pain.
Armenpress News Agency, Armenia
Thursday
Armenian President receives Georgian Minister of Economy and
Sustainable Development
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Sewrzh Sargsyan
receives on June 29 Georgian Minister of Economy and Sustainable
DevelopmentGiorgi Gakharia.
The President of the Republic welcomed the guest highlighting his
visit to Armenia and the business forum held in the sidelines of the
visit, which, according to the President, will give new impetus to the
development of bilateral trade and economic relations.
As “Armenpress” was informed from the press service of the Armenian
President’s Office, the interlocutors shared the opinion that the high
level partnership in political, economic and humanitarian aspects
between Armenia and Georgia during the 25 years of independence, as
well as the friendly relations between the two peoples serve as firm
grounds for further deepening and enhancing interstate relations.
The Armenian President and the Georgian minister discussed the
opportunities of developing bilateral trade and economic relations and
implementation of a number of mutually beneficial joint ventures. The
sides highlighted mutual assistance for entering to the markets of the
3rd countries and implementation of joint exports. The sides shared
the opinion that Armenia and Georgia, being involved in different
integration units (Armenia as EEU member state and Georgia as EU
associated country) have great potentials to develop partnership also
in the sidelines of the mentioned integration units.
Please find the attached press release of the Ministry of Diaspora.
Sincerely,
Media and PR Department
(+374 10) 585601, internal 805
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(+374 10) 585601, ներքին 805
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On July 1, young pianist Dmitry Iskhanov (Malta) will perform with the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia at Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall. He is known as a wunderkind of the classical world, as he performed at the best concert halls worldwide and was welcomed by the most demanding audience, the press service of the State Youth Orchestra reports.
12-year-old Dmitry Iskhanov is laureate of many international competitions. In 2012 he was awarded the first prize at the Golden Key Piano Competition (Frankfurt), as well as a special prize at Violin & Friends Competition (Malta), 1st prize at Citta di Barletta Competition and International Competition “FLAME” in France.
Headed by conductor Sergey Smbatyan Youth Orchestra will perform Symphony No.3 for String Orchestra by Vardan Adjemian, Piano Concerto No.3 “Youth” by Dmitri Kabalevsky (soloist: Dmitry Ishkhanov).
Every year, local doctors, dentists and nurses journey to Armenia to help those in critical need of care.
KABC
By Denise Dador
Wednesday, 06:18PM
LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. (KABC) —
Every year, local doctors, dentists and nurses journey to Armenia to help those in critical need of care. This is the ninth trip, but this year's mission will take on new meaning.
Every piece of equipment is needed. When Dr. Albert Phillips and his wife Susan set up their makeshift medical clinic in the Lori Province of Armenia, throngs of patients will be waiting for them.
"To this day, the area is still suffering economically in a lot of ways," said Dr. Phillips, an OB-GYN. A 1988 earthquake killed 25,000 people in the area.
The couple, working with the Armenian Missionary Association of America, started going on these overseas trips in 2008.
Thirty-seven other Armenian-American doctors, dentists, nurses and other caregivers will travel with enough medicine to supply patients for up to a year.
"You look into the faces and they could be your mother, grandmother, child and you can relate to them that way," Susan said.
"We have helped people with certain conditions that doctors in Armenia couldn't diagnose," Dr. Phillips said.
And this year for the first time, doctors are going to be treating Armenian refugees from Syria. The refugees have been on the run and probably haven't seen a doctor for a long time.
"In the four-and-a-half days which we are working, we will see close to 1,000 patients," Dr. Phillips said.
Pews in a church turn into exam areas. Sunday school classrooms become fully operable laboratories.
Many in Armenia live a harsh life, but Dr. Phillips said his group provides benefits beyond medical care. "We try to give them hope, not just for today, but forever," he said.
This mission is so inspiring that people are waiting in line to go next year.
"If you have a love for people and love to serve and use your talents then you need to come," Susan said. "You will never be the same. It changes your life in a radical way."
The Promise review: Romantic saga told against backdrop of Armenian genocide
Sandra Hall
★★★ M, 134 minutes
It's old-fashioned. Terry George, director of The Promise, agrees with the film's critics on that point.
Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon play two sides of a love triangle in The Promise. Photo: Open Road Films
The difference is that he believes it's necessarily old-fashioned – a romantic saga built on the David Lean model by way of persuading audiences to see a film about the Armenian genocide. And it's an understandable argument. There is not only the horrific nature of the Turkish government's massacre of 1.5 million of its Armenian population between 1915 and 1922. There are also the difficulties presented by Turkey's persistence in denying it ever happened.
MGM tried and failed to make a film about the genocide in the 1930s. Clark Gable was to have starred in an adaptation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Austrian novelist Franz Wurfel until the Turkish government threatened an international campaign against the film. And the Canadian independent Atom Egoyan, who is of Armenian descent, also found himself in a fight with "the denialist lobby" over his 2002 film Ararat. According to Variety, Miramax, Ararat's distributors, were bombarded with so many negative responses that its website crashed.
Christian Bale (left) and Oscar Isaac star in the film that tackles the Armenian genocide, albeit from a distance. Photo: Open Road Films
With these precedents working against it, The Promise would not have been made if it hadn't been for Kirk Kerkorian, a former head of MGM, whose family fled the Ottoman pogroms. Shortly before his death in 2015, Kerkorian put up the finance for the film, which was budgeted at $100 million, quite a chunk of money for an independent production.
George, who told the story of another genocide in Hotel Rwanda (2004), plots a careful course between romance and history, with romance coming out on top. It's an international cast. The ever-adaptable Oscar Isaac, whose career has seen him play Mexican, French, Russian and Indonesian, is cast – quite credibly – as the Armenian hero Mikael Boghosian.
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French-Canadian Charlotte Le Bon is the Armenian girl he loves and Christian Bale supplies the American element that seems to be essential to any historical epic that comes out of the US, whether or not the Americans had a significant role to play. He's a hard-drinking, hot-headed yet gallant American correspondent who insists on staying in Turkey to report on the massacre.
The action begins in 1915 with a glimpse of paradise. Mikael leaves his poor but happy village in southern Turkey to study medicine, having promised his new fiancee (Angela Sarafyan) he will be back in two years to marry her. Arriving in Constantinople, he finds a luminous fairytale city rich in possibilities.
His uncle, a prosperous Armenian merchant, welcomes him to his sunlit villa on the Bosphorus and five minutes later he's already regretting his engagement because he's fallen for Le Bon's Ana Khesarian. Paris-educated, she's working as tutor to his uncle's children but she also has a lover – Bale's Chris Myers. Wearing a moustache that is a performance in itself, he spots the couple's growing attraction to one another and morosely takes another hit of whisky.
But Turkey's entry into the war as Germany's ally soon puts an end to paradise, scattering the cast in various directions. Chris and Ana escape to the south so that he can get another angle on the war, while Mikael is shipped off to a labour camp. Death from starvation and overwork is imminent when he's saved by a series of niftily choreographed exploits of the "with one leap, Jack was free" variety.
Then he, too, heads south, speeding towards his inevitable reunion with Ana at such a rate you could be excused for imagining Turkey to be the size of Lord Howe Island, if it weren't for the effort that George's cameras put into evoking the country's desert flatlands, pine forests and rocky hillsides.
It's a handsome film and George manages to keep the genocide in focus with shots of the Turks herding long lines of refugees across the desert expanses. But the full horror is kept at one remove. Either it remains in the middle distance or we arrive for the aftermath – to be told rather than shown. And I can't pretend to be sorry about that, given the savagery with which the killings were carried out. At the same time, the facts of it all have been shoehorned so tightly – and tritely – into an over-familiar narrative formula that you don't feel a thing.