Dramaget reveals about Borat-oglu, who has decided to go public.

“my name a Aylin, but you can call me Borat-oglu, i come to you to speak dirty (I LIKE!). i learn much at the Ataturk University Supreme Truth Department. Genocide lies! Give me your gypsy tears, Armenians or you will be execute, like my friend who call premier Erdogan a man who does it with another man…”

“my hobby include deny genocides, shoot kurds, watch televison show “Ataturk’s best week ever” and “Big Ottoman Brother” You can come to my house, use my wife and the archives to learn truth of genocide is dirty propoganda. in turkeystan we say, a man who accuse a man of make genocides has a small khram or is a woman. you stupid, i clever. you die, i urinate on your monuments. Güle güle, fuk with you later!”

I think Artyom at iArarat.com posted Boratoglu’s photo couple of monts ago but didn’t realize it was Boratoglu.  

The rumor has it that Boratoglu will be opening a website that will give final rejection to “Big and fat Armanian lies about so-called genocide.” If you have seen the website, let me know.

Turkish researcher Ziya Meral has an interesting article in the Turkish Daily News(Nov 12, 2007) calling for “rehumanization” of Armenians by Turks and vice verse.

You are not alone if you have not heard the word ”rehumanization” before. Unlike its twin sister ”dehumanization,” rehumanization is not a popular tool in politics and identity construction.

[…] 

Rehumanization is restoring the other’s dignity and humanity and attributing the other the same rights ”we” have or demand. Without rehumanization, there can never be reconciliation simply because without accepting each other as human beings and acknowledging the other’s voice, we can never expect that the other will hear our pain and concerns and be moved by it to act unselfishly.

With stereotypes of Armenians and official historical propaganda in Turkey, Ziya says there was “no room left to hear what Armenians were trying to communicate.” 

Then one day, I found myself on a trip to Armenia and Karabakh. Thousands of scenarios went through my mind and none of them was about receiving hospitality. After two weeks, I found myself crying in a church in Karabakh and embracing a new Armenian friend. The same night, I remember crying more around a dinner table dominated by vodka shots and toasts for a better future. I was finally able to see who lives on the other side of Mount Ararat; not a group of conspirators with a mischievous plan, but a group of broken and hopeful people. Since then, ”Armenians” isn’t an abstract category for me. The tension between us have been rehumanized and made flesh and blood.

The author, then, discusses Armenian attitudes that the the Armenian Genocide was committed because Turks are a genocidal race.  But we all know that many Turks saved Armenians during the Genocide.  Yet…

If my memory does not fail me, I do not remember seeing a section in the memorial in Yerevan like the one in Yad Vashem– the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, dedicated to ”righteous among the nations.” The phrase refers to non-Jews who risked their lives for protecting Jews. It is a simple yet profound way of rehumanizing a past conflict by showing the humanity found in both ends of the story. Aren’t there Turks who have risked their lives protecting their neighbours and friends? An Armenian friend once replied to me by saying “only a handful, most of them did so for their own benefits.” In a single stroke, whatever they have done was relativized and stripped off its humanity. Thus, we are back to the black and white narrative of  ”Evil Turks.”

[…]

Although I have visited the Genocide memorial many times, I have not been to the actual museum.  I don’t know if there is a section for Turks who saved Armenians, but I highly doubt that there is.

My own great-grandmother was saved and raised for over five years by a Turkish woman in Urfa.  The Turkish woman didn’t do it for her benefit, at least not for benefiting the “Turks,” but benefiting humanity.  I agree with the author that there should be a section in the Genocide museum for those Turks who saved many Armenians.  We shall never forget these brave souls.

A newly lunched website, http://www.akrabamiariyorum.com/en/, gives opportunity for Armenians across the world to search for lost relatives, especially any possible survivors or their descendants who might be residing in the Republic of Turkey today.

For now, there are only announcments and no searchable database, but I hope the creators of the website will figure out a way to make it more friendly one day.

Today I watched yet another ‘unknown’ Armenian film and encourage everyone seeing it.

My friends and I went to to see Stone Time Touch (2007), which is being shown in Colorado as part of the 30th Denver Film Festival.

A summary of the film at The New York Times states:

Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Gariné Torossian interweaves memory, loss, and expectation in this experimental documentary, which follows actress Arsinée Khanjian through an Armenia that seems half-real and half-imagined. During her time spent filming director Atom Egoyan‘s Calendar in Armenia, Khanjian was treated to numerous stories of filmmaker Torossian‘s distant homeland. But so much can change over time, and now as these two curious souls explore a land rich in religious iconography and haunted by history viewers will bear witness to a decidedly nontraditional study in identity, home, and place.

Having born and lived in Armenia for over 16 years, I actually saw many things in the film that I didn’t know much about.  Instead of showing the developed side of Armenia, it takes you to the homes of the most oppressed people and makes you hear their stories.

A short reference to human trafficking almost brings one to tears, and yet the passage fails to explain what trafficking is and how it actually works.

The most interesting point of the film is the attempt to explain the connection of Armenians to their sacred stones.  And it’s a difficult task.  Although the film doesn’t articulate it, Armenian connection to historic churches is more than Christianity.  The stones give them sense of identity and are a sort of time travel to the days when Armenia was defining its identity.  It sounds like earth worshiping – closer to the way Native Americans honor the nature and mountains.

This film is a MUST see.

The Chemical Educator (Oct, 2007) has an article on the 150th Anniversary of Italian-Armenian Giacomo Luigi Ciamician’s Birth, who was the Founder of Green Chemistry.

Although Ciamician (Chamichian) was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times, he never received any. Back then, I guess, working for sustainable energy was not the coolest thing.

The article is available by registration only at http://chemeducator.org/bibs/0012005/12070362gk.htm.

[…]  

Giacomo Luigi Ciamician was born on August 25, 1857 in Trieste, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire…. Ciamician was very proud of his Armenian origin and heritage. The family claimed descent from Michele Ciamician, the great eighteenth-century historian of the Armenian people [20]. In about 1850 Ciamician’s family moved from Istanbul to Trieste, where there was a thriving Armenian community and where they had ties with one of the Mechitarist bishops.

[…]

It was quite natural that a scientist who had devoted his life to photochemistry, the chemical transformations induced by light, would consider the possibility of using solar radiation as a source of energy as an alternative to the coal that was the primary fossil source of energy during the last decades of the nineteenth century. How long would coal be sufficient for human needs? The English economist and logician (William) Stanley Jevons (1835–1882), several years before Ciamician did so, had suggested that the English coal mines would one day be exhausted. At the same time, in 1899, future (1903) Nobel chemistry laureate, Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927), a Swedish forerunner of today’s environmentalists, had suggested that the increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide caused by the combustion of fossil fuels could cause an increase in the earth’s temperature. The use of solar heat to produce electricity with thermoelectric devices had also been advocated by Antonio Pacinotti (1841–1912), Professor of Physics at the Università di Pisa. In this international, intellectual milieu Ciamician was invited to give a lecture at the inauguration of the 1903–1904 academic year of the Università di Bologna. He chose as its title “The Chemical Problems of the New Century”:

The problem of the use of the energy irradiated from the Sun is assuming and will assume increasing importance. When such a dream will be realized, the industries would be carried again to a perfect cycle, to engines that produce work with the force of the daylight that is free and does not pay taxes [43].

An interesting article in ArmeniaNow reveals two interesting things on cultural property in the South Caucasus – governments are highly involved in both protection and destruction.

For one, the article says, Armenia has welcomed European observers to monitor Azeri monuments on Armenian territory regardless whether Azerbaijan (which has twice denied such monitoring) agrees monitoring of Armenian monuments on its territory or not. 

The news that the government of Armenia has given its consent to the European observers to carry out a monitoring on the state of cultural monuments on the territory of the republic, regardless of the official Baku’s standpoint on receiving such group of experts, caused an ambiguous reaction in Armenia. It should be noted that the Secretary General of the Council of Europe Terry Davis declared this during his visit to Yerevan on November 5. Commenting on the news, he stressed that such position is in the country’s interests as it can have a positive impact on its international image.

This has invited criticism by those who think Armenia needs to improve civil rights and not “show off” that it is not destroying Azeri monuments as a means of promoting itself as a democratic country.

“Does the Council of Europe have the right to judge Armenia’s image not from the view of adhering civil freedoms, but of the declared interest in preservation of the Armenian nation’s cultural heritage?” wonders a well-known art critic, the Head of Avan’s Museum of History and Archeology Ara Demirkhanyan.

The ArmeniaNow article also shows a possible link between the destruction of world’s largest Armenian cemetery in Azerbaijan (reportedly destroyed in 1998, 2003 and finalized in 2005) and the now-deceased former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev, who was succeeded by his son.  It is not ruled out that the order was central, concludes an interviewee.

It’s noteworthy that it was in that period when a special archeological expedition started operating on the territory of Nakhijevan. “It [the expedition] was called by a direct order of Heidar Aliyev in 2001,” says the Deputy Head (on scientific issues) of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology and Ethnography Najaf Musiebli. “That expedition continued its work up to 2003. During the three years large-scale field works were held on the territory of Nakhijevan aimed at revealing historical monuments so far unknown to science. As a result of archeological excavations monuments of ancient settlements were discovered.”

“It’s quite possible that the given archeological party, besides other things, was engaged in making an ‘inventory’ of Armenian monuments that were subject to extermination. This is indirectly confirmed by the timing of its activity,” Demirkhanyan says.

Musiebli’s recently published (November 5) statement in this connection is worth mentioning here: “We have to say that the expedition was not organized by chance. Constant disinformation of the world community by the Armenians that the territory of Nakhijevan is also an ancient Armenian land forced the state to call a scientific-research expedition and as a result of numerous archaeological facts the false propaganda of the occupants was proved.”

Here is Robert Fisk’s November 10, 2007 column in the Independent that I am posting in full.

Robert Fisk: Holocaust denial in the White House

The Turks say the Armenians died in a ‘civil war’, and Bush goes along with their lies

Published: 10 November 2007

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik.

The “story so far” is familiar enough. In 1915, the Ottoman Turkish authorities carried out the systematic genocide of one and a half million Christian Armenians. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the 20th century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of six million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers – including our own British Government, and now even the US – to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a “civil war”, that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians.

And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was “sad and sorrowful” in view of the “strong links” Turkey maintained with its Nato partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then “our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot”.

Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering (sic) of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror.” I loved the last bit about the “global war on terror”. Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered “terror” more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that Nato should matter more than the integrity of history – that Nato might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world may have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusional US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would “harm the war effort in Iraq”. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial.

Former Representative Robert L Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12m from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik airbase through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey.

In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was even more pusillanimous – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, “believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…”.

How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very “roads and so on” down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge airbase that Mr Bush is so frightened of losing.

Had the genocide that Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same “roads and so on” that so concern the gutless Mr Gates.

But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he’s still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they’re “interested in preventing World War Three”, Bush has warned us. What piffle. Bush can’t even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One.

Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world – he who would protect us against “world terror” – would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?

Seven years after the mystic disappearance of one of Armenia’s most powerful and starving-activists-turned-to-multimillionaire-oligarchs, Interpol’s webpage still has him listed as “Wanted.” The missing oligarch – Vano Siradeghyan – is rightly accused of orchestrating many political assassinations.

Wanted
SIRADEGHYAN, Vano

Legal Status
Present family name: SIRADEGHYAN Forename: VANO Sex: MALE Date of birth: 13 November 1946 (60 years old) Place of birth: VILLAGE KOTI, NOYEMBERYAN REGION, Armenia Language spoken: Armenian Nationality: Armenia

Physical description
Height: 1.77 meter <-> 69 inches Colour of eyes: DARK Distinguishing marks and characteristics: BALD, STRAIGHT NOSE, LOOKS LIKE 45-50 YEARS OLD, MEDIUM BUILD

Offences
Categories of Offences: CRIMES AGAINST LIFE AND HEALTH Arrest Warrant Issued by: MALATIA – SEBASTIA / YEREVAN / Armenia

And as rumors persist that this former interior minister and mayor might be still living in his native region of Armenia’s north sponsored by supposed enemies like current president Robert Kocharyan, the return of former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan – a close friend of Vano – to the political stage makes one wonder whether the wanted oligarch may be pardoned if Ter-Petrosyan returns to power.

Whatever the case, Vano has relatives living in Armenia. And I have often hypothesized that Vano’s relatives might still be enjoying some protection and sponsorship – whether or not the sinister oligarch is in Armenia or not.

But a recent encounter by my sister with a relative of Vano in September of 2007 shows that I might have been wrong, at least in the case of one relative. Here is the unpublished account by Arpi Maghakyan.

“Oh, when is that day going to come, aunt Sveta?! We don’t know, but hope it will come soon,” interrupts a short woman entering the store. She is the third floor neighbor, Narine, with two children who go to school.

Like Narine, many from Dilijan – in Armenia’s north – have no idea when the day will come for them to have income again to pay off shopowner Sveta for goods that she loans to neigbors. Artyom, an unemployed 60-year-old, says all his family can do now is to wait. “This summer we moved out from our house to rent it out to tourists in order to make some money; we stayed in the streets and now wait for the next summer.”

Renting out during the peak season has become a tool of survival for many in Dilijan. Past summer a day’s rent was between 4,000 and 8,000 drams, roughly $12 and $27 in U.S. currency. Sveta’s neighbor Narine, her husband and their two kids had left Dilijan for the nearby Vanadzor city to stay with some relatives. “We managed to rent the house out three times this summer. With the income we made we paid off most of our debts to aunt Sveta; we bought clothers for the children with the rest of the money.”

Narine prides that her son sings very well and that whenever there are outside guests to their school he is asked to sing for them. “I want him to have normal clothes when he sings. I may be wrong, but it is important to me.” As she speaks, Narine’s eyes catch her son running in the street. “Artavazd!” she suddenly screams, “you have just come from school – go change your clothes!”

She then remembers that they won’t have much to eat in the winter. Although Dilijan’s forests provide their residents with lots of free goods – pear, apple, raspberry, and rosehip – she cannot make jam or other sweets with these because her family doesn’t have sugar. “I won’t beg for money, but I am begging for work. I want to be able to have hope tomorrow.” An older neighbor resonates with her and tries to appease the young mother, “We all want the same, dear Narine.”

In the Soviet times, there were many in Dilijan of different kinds. Locals say in those days you would not see a poor person in the town. But now unemployment is omnipresent.

You will find few apartments in lights at nights: many are out of town, others out of the country. Even the central street in downtown is not full of people in the evenings. “People leave for Russia or other places with their families. Many husbands or sons are abroad to send money for their families to survive here. And now, since the U.S. dollar has depreciated in Armenia, the oppressed are becoming even more oppressed and it is the people again who loose,” complains an old man.

A group of people who have been following the conversation are ignited with anger being reminded of the dollar’s depreciation. Their discussion is mainly to find the guilty: some accuse Armenia’s president Kocharian, others America’s Bush. Another one suggests that the head of Armenia’s central bank is in guilt for artificially depreciating the dollar.

Getting tired from politics, Narine and I leave the crowd in front of Mrs. Sveta’s shop and walk to the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier. It’s a daily path in Dilijan for locals to walk to the Memorial, and they do so with white buckets. Need for clean water rather than patriotism drives the locals to the memorial – there is a natural spring next to it that people take from to cook and drink. The water that comes through their sink is brown several days a week making it even impossible to take a shower. “The water from our sink is sometimes all black – you need to let it run for a while for it to become more brownish. But as the water runs so does the meter, right? And then comes the big bill.”

Unlike many others, Narine’s family doesn’t have a relative abroad and, hence, no help from outside. Instead, her husband Samvel Siradeghyan, a veteran disabled in the Artsakh war, receives 40,000 drams ($115) a month. “The hardest thing is that sometimes we don’t have money for a piece of bread. I mean not for meat, milk or honey – the things that kids like – but for an actual piece of bread. Samvel’s pension is not enough. I used to cook cakes in a café but it closed.”

Samvel is from nearby Noyemberyan region’s Koti village. In 1988 he got involved in the Artsakh liberation war and manufactured home-made weapons with his friends. “They are four brothers and all of them have fought in the war. Samvel was almost killed during testing his own brothers’ made bombs,” says Narine. She talks of her husband with love and pride, but warns that he doesn’t talk much and is not fond of questions about the war. He also refuses to register as a “Yerkrapah,” a political organization of former volunteers that provides some benefits for its members and could eventually help Samvel’s children with tuition. “That’s not what I fought for,” says the veteran whose face is covered with scars from the burns.

Samvel and his family moved to Dilijan after the war of the early 1990s. He married there Narine and had a decent job and helped many others. Narine reveals that Samvel’s uncle is the infamous Vano Siradeghyan, a former Armenian oligarch now sought by the Interpol.

“When Vano was removed from power my husband was fired. They didn’t take into account that my husband was disabled and had two children. They could have at least given him another job with less salary,” complains Narine. Her husband wants to do construction, but his health doesn’t permit him. She then asks why her husband should be fired for his last name, “wasn’t it with the same last name that he was fighting for the homeland?”

Depressed and appeased, she apologizes to me for complaining too much. One can see the two personalities fighting in her. One is hopeless and oppressed; the other is powerful, proud, happy and full of hope. She never reveals the first one to her kids.

Their apartment has one bedroom and a living room. It is clean and all white. The kids show off the computer in their living room. “This is a gift from our aunt. It has two games but we haven’t figured out the rest. It is Pentium II.” As they turn it on, the old monitor displays a menu with two games and no programs. It is impossible to look at the gloomy screen, but the kids are used to it. “I keep telling them to stop killing their eyes in front of the computer, but they don’t listen to me,” says Narine brining traditional Armenian coffee from the kitchen.

But the kids turn off the computer after their mother directs so. Artavazd gets ready to sing, and little Zepiur runs to bring her certificates of appreciations from school. They are both straight A students and also attend dance classes outside their primary school. Artavazd even finds time to go to a separate chess school. His sister Zepiur dreams of taking painting classes that are not otherwise offered at their primary school. Yet she also knows that her family cannot afford another expense.

Narine recalls the days when her husband helped everyone and didn’t let a child in their town go hungry. “I tell my husband that he helped others so much that today his own kids need help but there is no one giving a hand,” quietly murmurs Narine so that her children don’t hear her.

Artavazad leans to a chair and starts singing a traditional song about the mountains. He has clear voice and bright eyes that he now closes from being shy. Narine is full of tears of happiness. Her singer son, as many Armenian children, wants to become president when he grows up, but before that he dreams of having an electronic piano. “When I have an electronic piano,” he says, “I will compose my own songs and play the traditional songs I know.”

“Today I saw a teacher from the painting school and she said that, according to their rules, the first four years are free for our daughter,” Narine breaks the silence. Little Zepiur, who hasn’t known the good news until that point, startes jumping up and down on the sofa from happiness. It only takes the future painter’s Mom a look to stop her jump on the sofa.

Armenia ranks 71 in the newest Gender Gap Report released by the World Economic Forum.

The report examines the following:

1. Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment
2. Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education
3. Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures
4. Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio

Although Armenia gave women the right to vote in 1918, 2 years before the United States, and 99% of Armenia’s women are literate (as opposed to 100% of men), the percentage of women in the parliament is 5 today.

Female adult unemployment rate is 5% higher from men’s in Armenia.  The most interesting fact is the decrease of women educators as the level of educational institution increases:

Percentage of female teachers, primary education…………………………76Percentage of female teachers, secondary education……………………..56Percentage of female teachers, tertiary education…………………………41

The Report on Armenia is available through a .pdf document at http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/albania_to_dominican_republic.pdf. Apparently women in authoritarian Azerbaijan are better off – with a rank of 59, but not so much in (until yesterday) democratic Georgia – 67.

The United States ranked 31 in the Report, Turkey ranked 121 while Iran ranked 118. Russia ranked 45. For the ranking list, see http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/rankings2007.xls.

Sweden (1), Norway (2), Finland (3) and Iceland (4) once again top the rankings in the latest Global Gender Gap Report. All countries in the top 20 made progress relative to their scores last year – some more so than others. Latvia (13) and Lithuania (14) made the biggest advances among the top 20, gaining six and seven places respectively. The Report covers a total of 128 countries, representing over 90% of the world’s population.

Eagles, the best-selling American music group ever according to Wikipedia, is back with a new album, Long Road Out of Eden,  that according to the New York Times as quoted by Taipei Times, has some Armenian flavor.

Not until 12 songs into the album do the Eagles unveil something contemporary: the 10-minute title song. It’s their take on the war in Iraq, declaring, “the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste.”

The music is customized with what sounds like a duduk, an Armenian flute, and a military snare drum, but it’s still the kind of stolid, mid tempo song the Eagles have long relied on, with a guitar solo that virtually reruns Hotel California, stopping unfortunately short of the twin guitars.