The week in Armenia started with the commemoration of the victims of Spitak earthquake, which had claimed more than 25 thousand lives back in 1988. In connection with the 21st anniversary of the earthquake, top executives of the country visited the disaster area. However, in the political sense, all the attention of both the political establishment and the Armenian community was focused on the forthcoming meeting between the U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan.

The Armenian parliament approved Thursday the 2010 draft national budget. The document was adopted with a vote of 82 for, 16 against and 1 abstention. Opposition parties - ARF Dashnaktsutyun and Heritage - voted against the document. Armenian National Assembly Hovik Abrahamyan said the 2010 draft budget will help stabilize the economic situation in the republic. He said that AMD 1.7 billion will be allocated to pay off the deposits in soviet savings bank. Mr. Abrahamyan supported the Prime Minister's call for fighting oligopoly and pledged not to spare effort to prevent misuse of the state budget funds.

The policy of "zero relations with neighbours", which Turkey is trying to conduct without much success, has been effectively implemented in Egypt for over forty years now. And the matter is not only the unique peace-lovingness of the Egyptian government. The matter is simply the benefits to be gained. The Arab East is a very extensive, diverse and vague notion, and the fact that almost all the countries have entrusted especially Cairo to present their interests, means a lot.

A couple of years ago I had a chance of an interview with Robert Sahakyants and one could not assume at that time that he would leave the world so soon. We all knew he was ill, but no one suspected how serious the illness was. He was one of those without whom, in his opinion, everything would sink in sweet syrup. All that you'll read further are his direct words, as we thought no one could speak of Robert Sahakyants and the world surrounding him better than he himself. For some reason he always spoke Russian, although he knew his native language perfectly well. Call it freak of a genius if you like, but now that he is gone words, however beautiful they might be, are needless.

For the past month the focus of Internet-users and IT specialists around the world has been on three main events, namely the completion of the new operating system Windows 7 - the product of Microsoft Corporation, the release of the fast browser Chrome by Google and the work on our own operating system (OS).