Armenian News... A Topalian... 9 editorials
Rare Earth
Artsakh-Karabagh
The Country The World Says Doesn't Exist
MediaMax, Armenia
July 12 2019
Turkey is a security threat to Armenia, says Armenian FM
Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan has stated that "Turkey is a security threat to Armenia”.
“My security concern is Turkey. This is where that security threat comes to Armenia. 27 years of blockade, 27 years of denied justice, denied relations, is creating a serious security threat to us,” Mnatsakanyan said, while speaking at the 16th
Batumi International Conference dedicated to the Eastern Partnership.
He also stated that 2018 was a year of important progress for Armenia, which concerned solely Armenia and had no geopolitical connections. Mnatsakanyan noted that the situation was not easy to introduce to partners.
“So we have been quietly and patiently explaining this to our partners, who have doubts about whether democracy is a geopolitical tool. No one should search for foreign subtext in Armenia’s domestic political affairs, because they won’t find any.
Last year I asked this question to my friends in Europe: “Are we not sufficiently democratic to you because we are not sufficiently anti-Russian?”. This is not how we want to think. This is not how we think,” said Zohrab Mnatsakanyan.
JAM News
July 12 2019
Armenia is ageing: UN experts on the country’s demographic problems by 2050
On the bright side, one of the factors is improved living standards
By 2050, the population of Armenia will have aged considerably, Anna Hovhannisyan, coordinator of the programme “Population and Development” of the Armenian UN Population Fund, said at a press conference yesterday on July 11.
Hovhannisyan says this is largely due to migration, but also the growth in the quality of medical care is of great importance, thanks to which, life expectancy in Armenia will be longer.
“By 2050, the number of Armenian residents over 65 will double and make up 22 percent of the republic’s population. The number of people over 80 will also grow significantly,” said Hovhannisyan.
Hovhannisyan says that many developed countries face similar challenges, where people are living longer and giving birth to fewer children.
Public Radio of Armenia
July 11 2019
Catholicons Aram I visits Armenian historic sites in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus
Siranush Ghazanchyan
His Holiness Catholicos Aram I of the Armenian Church of the Holy See of Cilicia took the risk and crossed the border to the Northern Cyprus occupied by Turkey and paid a visit to the Armenian historical spiritual centers.
Accompanied by Vartkes Mahtesian, Armenia’s Representative in the Cyprus Parliament, His Holiness the Armenian Sourp Asdvadzadzin Church, the Saint Makar Monastery the National Prelacy and the Melikian-Ouzou
Public Radio of Armenia
July 13 2019
Jerusalem’s Armenians calling attention to increasing marginalization
Jerusalem-based master tile artist Neshan Balian is preparing two exhibitions marking the centenary of Armenian ceramics in the city in September—one in Armenia and one at Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Archaeological Museum, The Art Newspaperreports.
His grandfather and namesake was one of three artisans invited in 1919 by Mark Sykes of the British Mandate government to repair the tiles of the Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine and to introduce a new art to Jerusalem, author Lauren Gelfond Feldinger reminds.
Balian has also been commissioned by the municipality to renovate the city’s calligraphy-tiled street signs in English, Arabic and Hebrew. Hand-painted tiles with motifs designed by his late mother, Marie Balian, can be seen on murals, doors and wares across
Jerusalem.
But despite recognition, Balian, like his East Jerusalem neighbors, is still ethnically profiled and often subjected to full-body searches by Israeli airport security, he tells The Art Newspaper.
“I just turned 61, you get tired of pulling down your trousers to a 21-year-old [guard] who knows nothing of the sacrifices you have made to the Israeli art scene,” he says.
“More and more I feel like a second- and third-class citizen. There is a lot of emphasis on making Jerusalem as Jewish as possible. I’ll never be fully part of this city or country… I don’t think the elections make any difference,” he says.
Armenian church leaders say Christians in East Jerusalem “don’t enjoy equal rights”, although the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate has had a presence in Jerusalem since the fourth century.
Chancellor, Father Koryoun Baghdasaryan says “The most shameful thing is that a memorial to the Armenian genocide on church property remains closed to visitors because the municipality has delayed approving construction of the entrance.”
According to the source, the mayor’s office says a proper plan has not been submitted, but the Patriarchate assures all the necessary papers have been repeatedly filed over many years.
Israel has never officially recognized the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks from 1915. Baghdasaryan says there is a “moral obligation” for Israel, being home to around 200,000 Holocaust survivors, to recognize the genocide.
Still, the Armenian Patriarchate continues to honor its own history. A fundraising campaign is under way to renovate its Armenian Museum before 2020 and to open a new gallery space in the Armenian Quarter, raising awareness about the community’s history
in Jerusalem.
Panorama, Armenia
July 11 2019
PM: Pensions to rise in Armenia from January 2020
State pensions will increase in Armenia by 10 percent starting from 1 January 2020, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a government meeting on Thursday.
The PM said the decision was made on Wednesday when the government approved the medium-term expenditure program for 2020-2022 at a closed meeting.
Pashinyan said the salaries of teachers are set to increase from 1 September this year.
“The government will also attempt to resolve the housing issue of the citizens who have lost their homes as a result of the 1988 earthquake as part of the same program,” he said, adding 3 billion drams will be allocated in this regard.
The Armenian leader said the details of the program will also be clarified during further discussions.
Also, Pashinyan reminded that the salaries of military have already been increased since June this year.
The PM said yesterday’s meeting also addressed another important issue. “Our key task is to have a roadmap for achieving inclusive high economic growth. We believe the main solution to this problem is through the development of reprocessing, technological
industry and tourism,” he said.
Pashinyan said he has discussed the matter during his Vietnam and Singapore visits. He stressed the need to set up a working circle including companies engaged in reprocessing industry and specifically those companies that make a finished product from raw
materials.
ARKA, Armenia
July 11 2019
Armenian government to allocate AMD 3 billion for final solution to housing problem in quake-stricken areas
The Armenian government intends to solve housing problem in the quake areas stricken by the 1988 powerful earthquake, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told journalists on Thursday before a regular Cabinet meeting.
Earlier, Vahan Vermishyan, head of the Urban Planning Committee, said that the remaining 453 families will have their housing problem solved in 2020.
Nikol Pashinyan said AMD 3 billion (around $6.2 million) will be earmarked for this purpose.
In his words, a methodology of this problem solution will be decided in further discussions.
Last December 7 Armenia marked the 30th anniversary of a catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 25,000 people and left hundreds of thousands of others homeless. The magnitude 6.8 quake struck northwestern parts of Armenia which then was a Soviet Republic of 3.5 million residents.
The earthquake’s epicenter was near Spitak, a small town that was razed to the ground. Gyumri (known as Leninakan then), Armenia’s second biggest city, was also hit hard. The huge death toll was widely blamed on violation of seismic safety standards. --0----
Breitbart
July 10 2019
Colombian Town of Armenia Confused by Turkish-Funded Ottoman Mural
Frances Martel
Armenia, the capital city of Quindío, Colombia, is boasting a new mural of a man wearing Ottoman-era garb on the side of its city council building, an image with no historical correlation to the city that is confusing, and angering, many residents, Colombian
media reported Tuesday.
The mural, by artist Hollman Henao Díaz, is the product of the city’s mayor opening cultural bonds with the state of Turkey after the administration of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited him and several council members to Ankara this year for
a summit to tell the municipal officials “the other side” of the story of the Armenian genocide, according to the Colombian magazine Semana. While the debate lives on regarding any concrete ties linking Armenia the city to Armenia the country, in honor of its namesake, the Colombian city has formally recognized the genocide as such, something neither the federal governments of Colombia or Turkey have done.
Erdogan has expressed a personal belief that Muslims explorers reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus and thus the Muslim world should get the credit for expanding the Eurasian map of the world. To that end, he has attempted to invest in Turkish cultural centers in friendly countries in the region. After years of attempting to build a mosque in communist Cuba, where he once claimed Columbus had seen a mosque upon landing, he shifted gears to Venezuela, where he found the impoverished socialist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro more willing to allow the construction of a new religious center than the Castro regime.
The Turkish government has not explicitly connected its newfound relationship with the government of the city of Armenia to Erdogan’s belief in Muslims discovering America.
The regional newspaper La Crónica de Quindío reported Wednesday
that locals appear baffled, and some outraged, by the expensive mural, which they find irrelevant to their heritage.
“I don’t really understand what Armenia [the Colombian city] has to do with Turkey. I think that what they need is to pay back favors for that little trip they took,” a woman named Maricela Montes told the newspaper, referring to the trip to Turkey the mayor
and some council members made in February. “It is not logical that something like this would be painted on such a pretty department.”
The newspaper quotes another resident who says he is not angry, merely “confused.”
“We Quindianos are confused because we don’t understand what a sultan has to do with Armenia [the city],” Jorge Jaramillo said. “What is happening to us? Please, serious statesmen have to take the reins of this city. This is truly horrible for our capital.”
The president of the city council, Diego Torres Vizcaino, said in a statement that the mural is part of a cultural exchange with Turkey that will go both ways, according to Colombia’s El Tiempo.
“It was agreed with the administration of Armenia that we would structure commercial and tourism projects to be evaluated by the public and private sector of Turkey,” Torres said. “Just like that, [we also approved] cultural support initiatives with efforts
for the municipal game room and the Armenia School of Music, which are already in development.” The cultural exchange plan, he also claimed, would include postage stamps in both countries featuring the heritage of the other.
El Tiempo notes that the council is not only considering cultural favors to Turkey. They are now openly debating amending the 2014 declaration the city passed recognizing the Armenian genocide.
The genocide saw the extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians, along with Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christian ethnic minorities, by Turkish forces in 1915. Despite decades of pleas by the government of Armenia for the world to recognize what experts
consider the first modern genocide, many states have not weighed in, including Colombia. The Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the genocide, claiming that many Armenians died in World War I as a result of ongoing conflict. During his remarks this April on the anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, Erdogan called it
“the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period.”
Local media reported at the time that the original trip by the Colombian politicians to Turkey in February was prompted by the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, even though the anniversary is typically observed in April and known to have begun
in 1915. One councilman returning from the trip said of the Turks, “truly, we were surprised, we didn’t think they would know so much about us,” beaming that the Turkish officials referred to the city as a “hidden treasure.”
At least one councilman Luis Guillermo Agudelo, expressed outrage about the trip, describing it in an interview with Colombia’s Noticias Uno at the time as “not important” and “of little benefit to the city.”
“Whether the genocide of the Armenian people by the Turkish government existed or was really a product of war in 1915, that [debate] doesn’t benefit us,” Agudelo argued.
Speaking to El Tiempo this week, he called the mural “an absurdity.”
“This is a public building that has a very important connotation,” he said. “This is where our gallery was, and now they are totally changing its identity.”
The Turkish cultural push appears to have expanded to Colombia from Venezuela, where in 2017 Erdogan announced he would invest in a major mosque and Turkish cultural center in Caracas. The project seemed similar to one that he attempted to sell to Havana for years. The Cuban communist regime, wary of the expansion of religion, rejected the
idea.
Energy Reporters
July 12 2019
Armenia probes power shutdown
Armenia’s Infrastructure Ministry has blamed massive power outages and voltage drops this week on a voltage drop in the national grid.
“There are no frequency fluctuations in the system, stability has been restored,” the ministry said. “Efforts continue and the power supply is gradually being restored.”
The ministry said an investigation would identify the cause of the blackout.
“The public will be informed about the results,” the ministry said.
The director of Armenia’s National Security Service, Artur Vanesyan, has been instructed to report on the erratic supply and find if it was an act of sabotage.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said: “I would like to express my gratitude to our partners in Iran and Georgia, who provided operational support and it was possible to avoid a long-term collapse of the power grid.
“We can record that our energy system has demonstrated sufficient flexibility and vitality. We just need to understand the causes of the accident,” the prime minister said.
Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian posted on Facebook that outages were “possible across the republic” because of a failure within the grid.
Power was also cut in the Yerevan subway this week.
Yerevan Deputy Mayor Hakob Karapetian said the “power supply along the entire length of the subway was interrupted due to voltage drops in the network”.
“At some sections, trains were stranded inside the tunnels. Then the power supply was partially restored, and the trains that stopped between stations managed to arrive at the stations where passengers were evacuated,” Karapetian said.
“The situation is under control. The work of the subway has been suspended until the resolution of the power-supply problem,” he added.
In November 2013, Armenia suffered its worst power outage in nearly two decades after what the authorities called a disruption in electricity supplies from neighbouring Iran.
A new 250-megawatt power station in Yerevan would cut the electricity price by around 1-1.5 drams (1,000 drams=€1.9), said the head of the Public Services Regulatory Commission Garegin Baghramyan.
He said it would replace the ageing, inefficient Hrazdan plant.
Baghramyan said the new plant would be 4 per cent more efficient.
About US$250 million is expected to be invested in the project by Italy’s Simest and German giant Siemens, as well as international financial institutions.
The authorities said the new generating capacity would be used in regional programmes through the “gas for electricity swap” arranged with Armenia and Iran.
Armenia’s Soviet-era infrastructure is creaking. Picture credit: Flickr
[another Armenian hits the heights]
Daron Acemoglu named Institute Professor
10 July 2019
Versatile economist awarded MIT’s highest faculty honor.
Peter Dizikes
Economist Daron Acemoglu, whose far-ranging research agenda has produced influential studies about government, innovation, labor, and globalization, has been named Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor.
Acemoglu is one of two MIT professors earning that distinction in 2019. The other, political scientist Suzanne Berger, has been named the inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor. Acemoglu and Berger join a select group of people holding the Institute Professor title at MIT. There are now 12 Institute Professors, along with 11 Institute Professors Emeriti. The new appointees are the first faculty members to be named Institute Professors since 2015.
“As an Institute Professor, Daron Acemoglu embodies the essence of MIT: boldness, rigor and real-world impact,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “From the John Bates Clark Medal to his decades of pioneering contributions to the literature, Daron has built an exceptional record of academic accomplishment. And because he has focused his creativity on broad, deep questions around the practical fate of nations, communities and workers, his work will be essential to making a better world in our time.”
In a letter sent to the MIT faculty today, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and MIT Chair of the Faculty Susan Silbey noted that the honor recognizes “exceptional distinction by a combination of leadership, accomplishment, and service in the scholarly, educational, and general intellectual life of the Institute and wider community.” Schmidt and Silbey also cited Acemoglu’s “significant impacts in diverse fields of economics” and praised him as “one of the most dedicated teachers and mentors in his department.”
Nominations for faculty to be promoted to the rank of Institute Professor may be made at any time, by any member of the faculty, and should be directed to MIT’s Chair of the Faculty.
A highly productive scholar with broad portfolio of research interests, Acemoglu has spent more than 25 years at MIT examining complicated, large-scale economic questions — and producing important answers.
“I’m greatly honored,” he says. “I’ve spent all my career at MIT, and this is a recognition that makes me humbled and happy.”
At different times in his career, Acemoglu has published significant research on topics ranging from labor economics to network effects within economies. However, his most prominent work in the public sphere examines the dynamics of political institutions, democracy, and economic growth.
Working with colleagues, Acemoglu has built an extensive empirical case that the existence of government institutions granting significant rights for individuals has spurred greater economic activity over the last several hundred years. At the same time, he has also produced theoretical work modeling political changes in many countries.
He has researched the relationship between institutions and economics most extensively with political scientist James Robinson at the University of Chicago, as well as with Simon Johnson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. However, he has published papers about political dynamics with many other scholars as well.
Acemoglu has also been keenly interested in other issues during the course of his career. In labor economics, Acemoglu’s work has helped account for the wage gap between higher-skill and lower-skill workers; he has also shown why firms benefit from investing in improving employee skills, even if those workers might leave or require higher wages.
In multiple papers over the last decade, Acemoglu has also examined the labor-market implications of automation, robotics, and AI. Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, Acemoglu has shown how these technologies can reduce employment and wages unless accompanied by other, counterbalancing innovations that increase labor productivity.
In still another area of recent work, Acemoglu has shown how economic shocks within particular industrial sectors can produce cascading effects that propagate through an entire economy, work that has helped economists re-evaluate ideas about the aggregate performance of economies.
Acemoglu credits the intellectual ethos at MIT and the environment created by his colleagues as beneficial to his own research.
“MIT is a very down-to-earth, scientific, no-nonsense environment, and the economics department here has been very open-minded, in an age when economics is more relevant than ever but also in the midst of a deep transformation,” he says. “I think it’s great to have an institution, and colleagues, open to new ideas and new things.”
Acemoglu has authored or co-authored over 120 (and still rapidly counting) peer-reviewed papers. His fifth book, “The Narrow Corridor,” co-authored with Robinson, will be published in September. It takes a global look at the development of, and pressures on, individual rights and liberties. He has advised over 60 PhD students at MIT and is known for investing considerable time reading the work of his colleagues.
As a student, Acemoglu received his BA from the University of York, and his MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics, the latter in 1992. His first faculty appointment was at MIT in 1993, and he has been at the Institute ever since. He was promoted to full professor in 2000, and since 2010 has been the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics.
Among Acemoglu’s honors, in 2005 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to the best economist under age 40. Acemoglu has also won the Nemmers Prize in Economics, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This month, Acemoglu also received the Global Economy Prize 2019, from the Institute for the World Economy.
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