Education and qualification improvement were in the focus of IT companies’ leaders who gathered for a meeting in Tsaghkadzor. Bilateral contacts should be established to develop industry and education, according Vache Kirakosyan, head of the IT department at the Armenian Economy Ministry. “Enterprises with rich resources are working to this end. Synopsis and National Instruments apply interesting schemes for cooperation, while minor companies have to anchor hopes with badly-educated university graduates Education system should be reorganized to develop technologies in Armenia,” he said.

Recent developments in the Karabakh front, among other things, confirmed one very important thing, rather the truth: international community is not concerned about conflicts in the former Soviet Union and no one will go farther than issuing high-profile declarations and “condemning”. Neither will they try to prevent transition of the conflict into a “hot” phase. World powers and the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will intervene only when their own interests in a particular region are affected.

Organizers of the 7th Golden Apricot Film Festival continue revealing secrets regarding the event. It became known that the opening and closing ceremonies will be conducted by Serge Avedikian, the winner of Palme d'Or. The festival will open with the screening of Henri Verneuil’s Mayrig (Mother) film by will open. This year, the program includes more films. The core of the festival will be German film director Eric Friedler’s Catastrophe documentary dedicated to the 95th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

The 9th EU-Armenia Subcommittee meeting on trade, economic and related legal issues was held in Yerevan this week. The topics under discussion at the subcommittee included macroeconomic developments in Armenia, recent developments in the EU-Armenia bilateral trade, prospects for establishing an EU-Armenia Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area, developments in a number of trade and investment related regulatory areas such as technical regulations and standards, sanitary and phytosanitary issues, intellectual property rights and tax & customs issues. The subcommittee will also discussed EU trade-related assistance to Armenia, including preparations of the new Comprehensive Institution Building (CIB) program.

Yerevan hosted a conference of the Social International Committee of CIS, Caucasian and Black Sea states, which brought together representatives of socialistic parties from 13 CIS and European countries: Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Palestine and Azerbaijan. Summarizing the conference results, Secretary General of Social International Luis Ayala noted that they have managed to fulfill all the planned tasks during the two-day conference. “Our primary goal is to spread democracy in all those countries where we are represented. In some countries, for example in Armenia, we have managed to form an open society, while in some countries it is a long-lasting process,” he said.

The excavations in the territory of the ancient fortress of Van Kingdom - Erebuni (782 BC) -have been carried out gradually due to a number of reasons.

Boxing: 3 Armenian boxers – Hovhannes Davtyan, Hrachik Javakhyan and Arthur Khachatryan – broke through to the semifinal of the European Championships going on in Moscow, Russia. Vanes Martirosyan (28-0, 17KOs) won the battle of the unbeaten junior middleweights with a unanimous ten round decision over Joe Greene (22-1, 14KOs) to retain the NABF/NABO super welterweight titles. The official scores were 96-93, 96-93 and 98-91.