Vinhomes Central Park and Landmark 81, Vietnam’s tallest building are seen from the Saigon river in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam June 6, 2019. REUTERS/Yen Duong
A Vietnamese court has sentenced an environmental activist to three years in prison on charges of tax fraud, just days after the government discussed protecting human rights with U.S. President Joe Biden during a state visit.
Hoang Thi Minh Hong, director of an environmental advocacy group that she started in 2013 and ran until 2022, was convicted of tax evasion after trial in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday that lasted half a day, according to her lawyer Nguyen Van Tu.
“Hong pleaded guilty, and therefore the trial ended quickly,” Tu told Reuters by telephone.
The U.S. State Department said it was “deeply concerned” by the sentencing and reiterated calls on Vietnam to “release all those unjustly detained and to respect the right to freedoms of expression and association.”
The State Department praised the track record of Hong and said leaders like her played “a vital role in tackling global challenges.”
Hong was accused of dodging tax payments worth 6.7 billion dong ($274,488) during the 2012-2022 period, Thanh Nien newspaper cited the indictment as saying.
She was also made to pay a cash fine of 100 million dong, her lawyer said, adding that she has 15 days to decide whether to appeal the verdict.
“This conviction is a total fraud, nobody should be fooled by it,” said Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project charity.
“This is yet another example of the law being weaponised to persecute climate activists who are fighting to save the planet,” he said.
Biden left Vietnam on Sept. 11 after having upgraded diplomatic relations and sealed multiple deals with Hanoi’s leaders, drawing criticism from human rights organisations that accused him of sidelining issues of human rights.
Hong in 1997 became the first Vietnamese to visit Antarctica, was hailed by former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2018 for mobilising “a youth-led movement to create a greener world”, and was awarded a grant from the first Obama Foundation Scholars Program at Columbia University that year.
The Thanh Nien report said Hong expressed her remorse and asked for leniency at the trial so that she could “return and continue to contribute to the society and the country.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday called on the Vietnam government to drop all charges against Hong and unconditionally release her.
“The Vietnamese authorities are using the vaguely worded tax code as a weapon to punish environmental leaders whom the ruling Communist Party deems a threat to their power,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at HRW.
As of early this month, Vietnam was holding at least 159 political prisoners and was detaining 22 others pending trial, HRW said.
On Sept. 15, Hanoi police detained Ngo Thi To Nhien, executive director of the Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition, an independent think tank focused on green energy policy. The U.N. human rights office this week raised concerns about the arrest.
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The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh as a breakaway state is a seminal point — a rare supernova among the constellation of ethnic conflicts left by the implosion of the USSR.
Refugees sit in the back of a truck near Kornidzor, Armenia, on Thursday. Alain Jocard / AFP – Getty Images
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Sept. 28, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC
By Matt Bradley and Natasha Lebedeva
After more than half the population of an ethnic Armenian enclave fled their homes in a mountainous pocket of land south of Russia, the breakaway republic’s leaders said it would soon “cease to exist.”
In what amounted to a formal capitulation to Azerbaijan, which surrounds it, the Armenian leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh said the self-declared Republic of Artsakh would be dismantled by the end of the year.
This would end three decades of intermittent conflict in and around the enclave, break a 10-month blockade of the region in the South Caucasus that residents said had starved them into submission, and dash hopes of an independent state in territory claimed by Azerbaijan.
The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh as a breakaway state is a seminal point — a rare supernova among the constellation of ethnic conflicts left by the implosion of the then-Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The conflict’s abrupt halt reflects how the geopolitical reach of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced realignments far beyond that war.
In an official decree, the region’s separatist President Samvel Shakhramanyan said that residents of Nagorno-Karabakh must now “familiarize themselves with the conditions of reintegration” into Azerbaijan and make “an independent and individual decision about the possibility of staying (or returning) in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
An Armenian family fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh arrives at Yerevan airport in 1991 after being evacuated by a Soviet army helicopter.Wojtek Druszcz / AFP via Getty Images
The announcement came as around 70,000 of the enclave’s population of about 120,000 fled from the region, which sits within Azerbaijan’s borders, to neighboring Armenia, according to Armenia’s government, with more still arriving.
Many residents hauled what few personal belongings they could gather into packed cars, trucks, buses and tractors, some pockmarked with shrapnel after days of Azerbaijani attacks.
Armenia’s leadership has accused Azerbaijan of instigating a refugee crisis by launching a swift invasion this week. Azerbaijan has denied allegations of “ethnic cleansing,” saying it is not forcing people to leave, and would peacefully reintegrate the region and guarantee rights of ethnic Armenians.
Holding a wealth of monasteries, mosques and other religious sites, Nagorno-Karabakh is culturally significant for both Muslim Azeris and what was an overwhelming Christian Armenian population. Armenians in Azerbaijan have been victims of pogroms, while Azerbaijanis claim discrimination and violence at the hands of Armenians.
“Azerbaijan has won a comprehensive military victory and what we’re looking at now is the prospect of Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians or with very few Armenians remaining,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with the London-based Carnegie Europe think tank. “So in that sense, Azerbaijan has won.”
The Karabakh Mountains, seen from the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan on Wednesday.Alain Jocard / AFP – Getty Images
For those fleeing, the despair of losing their homes was made worse by losing their homeland.
“Many of them are from villages which were taken by the Azerbaijani army, so they really lost their homes already,” said Astrig Agopian, a French Armenian journalist who has been reporting this week on the refugee crisis from Armenia’s border. “There is really this feeling that this time is different. It’s another war, but it’s a war that is definitely lost this time.”
Were that the case, it would bring to an end decades of violence in the region, which has been at the center of geopolitical interests between Eastern and Western nations for centuries.
The political dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh began as the then-Soviet Union weakened in the late 1980s, and Armenians demanded that the majority-Armenian region be incorporated into the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh comfort a young woman upon arriving in Kornidzor, Armenia, on Tuesday. Vasily Krestyaninov / AP
After the USSR collapsed in 1991, the conflict erupted into a full-scale war that persisted until a Russian-brokered peace deal in 1994. About 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people displaced.
“My husband died in the first war. He was 30, I was 26. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. It is the fourth war that I went through,” Narine Shakaryan, a grandmother of four, told the Reuters news agency after she arrived in Armenia. “My husband died back then, he was 30 in 1994. That’s the cursed life that we live.”
The fighting continued intermittently for several more decades, leaving an indelible mark on generations of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian residents. A recent war in 2020 saw the more powerful Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, reclaim much of the land surrounding the area, as well as part of the region itself.
Russia negotiated an end to that flare-up and even deployed peacekeepers to ensure security along the Lachin Corridor, the single mountain road that connected Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh.
But the events of the past year show how Moscow, which has historically played the role of both peacekeeper and ally to Armenia — which shares its Christian roots and hosts a Russian military base — has adjusted its allegiances following its invasion of Ukraine and its conflicts with the West.
Refugees crossing the border near Kornidzor, Armenia, on Wednesday.Alain Jocard / AFP – Getty Images
“The pivotal factor was that Azerbaijan was talking separately to the Russians, and had a joint agenda with the Russians, to pressure Armenia and also to keep the West out of the Caucasus,” de Waal said. “This is why when the Azerbaijani assault happened, Russian peacekeepers who could have actually stopped it stood down. And then Russia failed to condemn the attack.”
After its invasion of Ukraine left Russia isolated, Moscow may feel it has more to gain from cozying up to Azerbaijan than Armenia, particularly after the latter made a public display of cozying up to the West and provided humanitarian aid to Kyiv.
Earlier this month, the country conducted joint exercises with the U.S. military and the Armenian Parliament is set to vote next week on whether to accede to the International Criminal Court, which classifies Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal — a move the Kremlin characterized Thursday as “extremely hostile.”
Inside Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s government has assured the region’s Armenian population that they will be treated humanely and afforded equal rights.
But after months of blockades and blistering fighting, few ethnic Armenians believe it and many feel they have no choice but to flee.
Military equipment, weapons and ammunition seized in the Karabakh region – LIST
Information on military equipment, weapons and ammunition seized after the completion of local anti-terror measures conducted in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region as of 18:00 on September 28.
U.S. Agency for International Development has deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) in the South Caucasus region to coordinate the U.S. humanitarian response in Nagorno Karabakh, the USAID reports.
The DART will assess the situation, identify priority needs to scale up assistance, and work with partners to provide urgently needed aid.
This week, USAID Administrator traveled to Armenia to hear directly from the people fleeing their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh in the wake of Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 attacks.
“The United States is deeply concerned about the safety of vulnerable populations in Nagorno-Karabakh and the more than 50,000 people who have fled to Armenia. We are grateful to the Government of Armenia for welcoming new arrivals and helping them find shelter and to humanitarian organizations working to address acute needs,” Power said in a statement.
“Last week’s unacceptable military operation has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse. For nine months, Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin Corridor – shutting down a vital lifeline that connects the residents of Nagorno-Karabakh with food, medicine, fuel, and commercial supplies which is creating dire shortages,” she said.
“The Lachin Corridor must remain fully and permanently open so that civilians can leave and return freely, communities can access food, medicine, and other essential supplies, and humanitarian organizations can see and meet needs on the ground. Azerbaijan must protect civilians, uphold its obligations to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all individuals in its country, and ensure its forces comply with international humanitarian law,” Samantha Power stated.
Given the scale of the needs, the United States announced $11.5 million in humanitarian assistance earlier this week to support communities across the South Caucasus who are affected by the ongoing crisis. This is in addition to the more than $23 million the United States has provided in humanitarian assistance since 2020 in response to the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. These funds will be used to provide everything from food to psychosocial support to help address trauma caused by the violence and mass displacement.
The moment we expected has come! Azerbaijan’s efforts were very successful and led to the abolition of the so-called “Nagorno-Karabakh” name on earth. September 28 is considered a historical achievement of Azerbaijan. In the end, all the projects of 200-year-old Armenian separatists were destroyed along with miatsum.
The new reality in Karabakh is a consequence of the military and political victories of Azerbaijan, the Director General of the Caspian Institute for Strategic Studies (Russia) Igor Korotchenko said, Report informs.
Armenians ‘lose motherland’ in blow to Russia’s influence abroadposted at 15:37:55 UTC via ft.com Last week, Vardan Tadevosyan was still the health minister of a small if unrecognised republic in the south Caucasus mountains, managing dozens of government employees and running one of the busiest medical facilities in the region.But in a span of 24 hours,…
“Russia could lay down arms and end its war today. Ukraine does not have that option,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is on a visit to Kyiv, told a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Report informs.
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has viewed the construction progress of the Jabrayil Residential Complex – the first residential quarter being built in the city by the State Housing Construction Agency, Report informs via AZERTAC.
On September 28, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev visited Zangilan region and took part in the groundbreaking ceremonies of the third and fourth residential complexes and a kindergarten for 160 places in the city of Zangilan, as well as the villages of Zangilan and Alibeyli.In addition, Aliyev participated in the opening of the Jahangirbeyli hydroelectric…
The moment we expected has come! Azerbaijan’s efforts were very successful and led to the abolition of the so-called “Nagorno-Karabakh” name on earth. September 28 is considered a historical achievement of Azerbaijan. In the end, all the projects of 200-year-old Armenian separatists were destroyed along with miatsum.
The new reality in Karabakh is a consequence of the military and political victories of Azerbaijan, the Director General of the Caspian Institute for Strategic Studies (Russia) Igor Korotchenko said, Report informs.
Armenians ‘lose motherland’ in blow to Russia’s influence abroadposted at 15:37:55 UTC via ft.com Last week, Vardan Tadevosyan was still the health minister of a small if unrecognised republic in the south Caucasus mountains, managing dozens of government employees and running one of the busiest medical facilities in the region.But in a span of 24 hours,…
“Russia could lay down arms and end its war today. Ukraine does not have that option,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is on a visit to Kyiv, told a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Report informs.
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has viewed the construction progress of the Jabrayil Residential Complex – the first residential quarter being built in the city by the State Housing Construction Agency, Report informs via AZERTAC.
On September 28, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev visited Zangilan region and took part in the groundbreaking ceremonies of the third and fourth residential complexes and a kindergarten for 160 places in the city of Zangilan, as well as the villages of Zangilan and Alibeyli.In addition, Aliyev participated in the opening of the Jahangirbeyli hydroelectric…
Last week, Vardan Tadevosyan was still the health minister of a small if unrecognised republic in the south Caucasus mountains, managing dozens of government employees and running one of the busiest medical facilities in the region.
But in a span of 24 hours, the government of Nagorno-Karabakh ceased to exist. Soon, Tadevosyan’s staff began to leave their offices; patients vacated their hospital beds; doctors and nurses disappeared. There were so few police officers left that the streets started to feel unsafe.
Only the roads out of the region’s capital, Stepanakert, were busy — jammed with the tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians fleeing the city after Azerbaijan retook the breakaway enclave by force in a brief but bloody war last week. About 200 people were killed, according to local officials; the injured were soon ferried to Yerevan, the Armenian capital.
“We don’t have any more army, we have no police, no state . . . in two days, only ghosts will be around. The city will be totally empty,” Tadevosyan said, speaking by phone from the medical centre he founded 25 years ago.
He had come to the centre to pack up its equipment. “Almost all of my staff are already on their way,” he said. “Just a couple of people are still here, but all of them want to leave.”
Stepanakert’s empty streets mark a tragedy for Armenia, a country that sees the mountainous region as its ancestral heartland — a point strongly disputed by its oil-rich neighbour Azerbaijan, which also has historical ties to the area.
It also marks an abrupt and brutal end to one of the most bitter land disputes born of the Soviet Union’s collapse, one that had defined the region for decades. The territory, which was internationally recognised as Azerbaijan’s, became known as a textbook “frozen” conflict, one that allowed Russia to continue playing power broker in what it terms its “near abroad”.
But as Armenia reels from the events of the past week, Russia’s hold over the country appears to have been damaged beyond repair. Moscow was long seen as Armenia’s key ally and security guarantor; Armenians expected it to protect the status quo and prevent the absorption of Karabakh into Azerbaijan.
“Our hopes rested on the Russians, they are our brothers. Why did they allow the Azerbaijanis to treat us this way?” said a former village shopkeeper, who had brought her thin, wizened, 85-year-old mother to a hospital after making the journey out of Karabakh. Both women had lost a son to one of the many wars for Karabakh.
In the hospital, located in Goris in southern Armenia, wards are filled with families who fled and are now recovering from their gruelling journey. So far, more than 70,000 people — or more than half of Karabakh’s total population — have left.
One woman spent two nights with her daughter, who has cerebral palsy, in the huge queue of cars that had formed along the single, serpentine road out from Karabakh, laying the 12-year-old on the ground when she had epileptic fits.
Another had brought her husband to the hospital; he had suffered a mini-stroke after crossing a checkpoint set up by Azerbaijan.
Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan last week publicly criticised Russia and questioned the work of the 2,000 Russian soldiers that had been deployed since 2020 to keep the peace in Karabakh.
Pashinyan told Armenians that “the security systems and the allies we have relied on for many years” were “ineffective”, and that the “instruments of the Armenian-Russian strategic partnership” were “not enough to ensure Armenia’s external security”.
It marks a historic shift in the country’s foreign policy and, for Moscow, a loss of one of its oldest allies. “We are convinced that the Armenian leadership is making a huge mistake,” the Kremlin said, decrying Pashinyan’s “pivot away from Russia” and “a frenzied anti-Russian campaign” in local media.
As protests broke out in Yerevan over the loss of Karabakh, some Armenians spoke of their fear that Russia could fuel the demonstrations in order to put pressure on Pashinyan, or even overthrow him, a claim the Kremlin swiftly denied.
Distracted by its draining war in Ukraine, Russia however is unlikely to muscle in, as it has been known to do when countries drift from its orbit, said Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center, a think-tank in Yerevan.
“Yes, Moscow is angry with Yerevan. But Moscow is more angry and much more challenged by Baku,” Giragosian said. The seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh revealed “Russian weakness in the face of the Azerbaijani use of force”, furthering the “steady erosion of Russia’s standing and the slow death of the ‘myth of Russian military might’”, he said.
With Armenian public anger over the loss of Karabakh directed more at Russia, as well as the breakaway region’s elite, and at the west for its inaction, Pashinyan’s position seems secure, Giragosian said.
Fears remain, however, that Azerbaijan’s ambitions could extend beyond Karabakh, which it first lost to Armenia in a war in the 1990s, and into southern Armenia.
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev recently described the region as “western Azerbaijan”, though the two countries are also holding peace talks where they are expected to mutually recognise each other’s territorial integrity. “We have no claim on their territory,” Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the UK, told the Financial Times.
As the exodus from Karabakh continues, Azerbaijani security services have not yet entered Stepanakert, locals said. But border guards have made the first arrest of a member of the Karabakh elite. Another on Thursday decided to give himself up, travelling to Azerbaijan.
A process of disarmament is ongoing, with Karabakh soldiers handing over weapons to Azerbaijan at Russian peacekeeping bases.
That process is going peacefully, Suleymanov said. He rejected the notion of ethnic cleansing, saying people were leaving of their own accord, and though he acknowledged that they might be driven out by fear, he said they were victims of manufactured hysteria.
He described the region as being restored to “normalcy” after the fighting, with aid being delivered, field kitchens going up and Azerbaijani doctors soon to be sent to work in local hospitals.
Armenians fleeing Karabakh see things differently.
“It was chaos, an anthill. Everyone was rushing around in a panic,” said a 50-year-old teacher, holding her two-month-old granddaughter in the hospital in Goris. The family had struggled to find medical aid for an infection the baby had caught while they were sheltering underground from Azerbaijan’s offensive.
The child was saved by a doctor who had planned to evacuate but chose to stay on for longer when the baby’s condition worsened. On Monday, when nurses began handing out the hospital’s medical supplies for free, the family decided to risk it and leave.
Tadevosyan, who queried whether he should be referred to as the health minister of Nagorno-Karabakh since the republic no longer existed, said he was dismayed by the “very chaotic” evacuation.
“People just started to leave. No one is giving them instruction,” he said. He plans to leave as well, but not for some time yet. “I have to be one of the last to go.”
Late on Monday, as people struggled to buy petrol for the journey out of Stepanakert, which is called Khankendi in Azeri, a massive explosion rocked a fuel depot, killing more than 100 people and covering the sky in thick, black smoke.
It was a devastating final blow, Tadevosyan said. “The explosion just killed everyone morally. We were already very sad. It is dramatic, tragedy feeling, when your country is leaving, and you lose your motherland.”
Armenia will process the historic loss for years to come. “I lost my identity,” Tadevosyan said.
posted at 15:20:36 UTC by Peter Suciuvia19FortyFive
Both Kyiv’s and Moscow’s forces have faced a shortage of ammunition in the now more than 19-month-long war, which at times has been little more than an artillery duel between the two sides.
posted at 15:17:33 UTC by Forbes Breaking NewsviaForbes Under 30
At a House Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about the impeachment inquiry into President Biden, blaming former President Trump for the hearing.
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
posted at 15:17:33 UTC by Forbes Breaking NewsviaForbes Under 30
At a House Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) demanded a subpoena of Rudy Giuliani.
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
The U.S. Real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.1% for the second quarter of 2023, according to a revised report released Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Julia Pollak, chief economist for ZipRecruiter, joined CBS News to discuss the numbers.
Программа поддержки Грузии Международного валютного фонда (МВФ) приостановлена по причине процессов, развивающихся вокруг Нацбанка Грузии. Действие программы МВФ является своеобразным руководством для финансовых институтов и инвесторов для формирования представления о макроэкономической стабильности и инвестиционном климате конкретной страны. Что означает прекращение программы для Грузии? Программа МВФ Международный валютный фонд помогает странам-реципиентам, таким как Грузия, достигать и поддерживать […]
Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region ride in a truck upon their arrival at the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia, September 27, 2023. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze Acquire Licensing Rights
LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) – Azerbaijan does not want a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and is not encouraging anyone to leave the “liberated” region, Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Britain, said on Thursday.
In an interview with Reuters, Suleymanov said Azerbaijan, which took back control of Karabakh last week in a military operation, had not yet had a chance to prove what he said was its genuine commitment to provide secure and better living conditions for those ethnic Armenians who choose to stay.
Some 70,500 people had crossed from Karabakh into Armenia by early Thursday afternoon, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, out of an estimated population of 120,000. Earlier, Ethnic Armenian authorities in Karabakh said they were dissolving the breakaway statelet they had defended against Azerbaijan for three decades.
Many of those leaving have said they fear persecution and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Azerbaijan. Some critics have said the exodus, which has shown how little trust many Armenians have in Azerbaijani promises, is what Baku wants as it will make it easier to resettle the area with Azerbaijanis.
Suleymanov, who issued a call on social media appealing to ethnic Armenians to stay and be part of a multi-ethnic Azerbaijan, said he understood why many civilians were frightened, but that those who chose to stay would benefit from planned rebuilding and infrastructure projects.
“What should Azerbaijan do? We cannot keep them by force, we don’t want to keep anyone by force, (but) we don’t encourage anyone to leave,” he said, adding that Azerbaijani authorities had delivered requested medical, fuel and other supplies.
“We would prefer for people at least to be in a position to make a more informed decision on whether they want to stay. So far, Azerbaijan has not had any chance to prove anything because the time was very short.”
HISTORIC MONUMENTS
Karabakh Armenians will enjoy the same rights and protections as other citizens of Azerbaijan, he said. Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.
He rejected Armenian fears that Azerbaijan would now proceed to destroy Armenian churches and monasteries in Karabakh, saying Baku had “no reason” to destroy historic monuments.
Baku’s use of force to retake Karabakh has fuelled fears among some Armenians that it may also use force to carve out a land corridor via Armenia to link up western Azerbaijan with its autonomous exclave of Nakhchivan, a strip of territory nestled between Armenia, Iran and Turkey.
Suleymanov said the idea was to re-open transport corridors and make the wider region more prosperous and that he hoped a road and rail corridor could be agreed on via negotiation.
“Nobody is going to open anything by force,” he said. “That defeats the purpose. Nobody is going to put troops there, we’re not going to invade them (Armenia).”
Reporting by Andrew Osborn Editing by Gareth Jones
As Russia Chief Political Correspondent, and former Moscow bureau chief, Andrew helps lead coverage of the world’s largest country, whose political, economic and social transformation under President Vladimir Putin he has reported on for much of the last two decades, along with its growing confrontation with the West and wars in Georgia and Ukraine. Andrew was part of a Wall Street Journal reporting team short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He has also reported from Moscow for two British newspapers, The Telegraph and The Independent.
Few people take the time to give thanks to American astrologer Richard Noelle. Astrology as a whole may not have contributed much to the advancement of science, but that doesn’t mean that an astrologer’s ideas can’t have a very big impact. In 1979, Noelle had a good idea indeed, when he coined the now-ubiquitous term “supermoon.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Prior to Noelle’s brainstorm, the common descriptor for a full moon that occurs at the low point, or perigee, in its orbit around the Earth was a “perigean full moon,” a turgid bit of phrasing not remotely in keeping with the loveliness of the phenomenon. This year has been a good one for supermoons, with three occurring already—on July 3, Aug. 1, Aug. 30—and a fourth one teed up to appear in the eastern sky just after sunset on Sept. 28. September’s supermoon will reach its brightest illumination at 5:58 a.m. ET on Sept. 29, and set shortly after.
During the time the supermoon is riding across the sky there will be plenty to see. For one, the moon will not make its appearance alone. About an hour before it becomes visible, Saturn will rise and precede the moon across the sky throughout the night. Jupiter will then appear, about 90 minutes after the moon does, and similarly fly in tandem with it.
Then there’s the spectacular sight of the moon itself. The average distance between the Earth and the moon is 384,400 km (238,855 mi.). But that figure has a lot of wiggle room. The moon’s path around the Earth is elliptical; at its most distant point, or apogee, it is 405,500 km (253,000 mi.) away; at its perigee, it is just 363,300 km (226,000 mi.) from us.
A full moon during such close approaches appears to be as much as 14% larger than an ordinary full moon. Not everyone is impressed by this. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), in 2017, astrophysicist, author, and television personality Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote: “If last month’s Full Moon were a 16.0 inch pizza, then this month’s ‘Super’ moon would be 16.1 inches. Just saying.” In a follow-up post, he added: “If a 16.1 inch pizza is ‘super’ to you, compared with a 16.0 inch pizza, then we have an issue of vocabulary.”
But the visual impact a supermoon can make is powerful—especially when it has just risen or is about to set, thanks to the straightforwardly named “moon illusion.” When the moon is in the sky but hugging the horizon, there are lots of relatively small surface features like trees and houses in the foreground. The farther away from us those objects are, the smaller they seem to be. The occipital lobe and other sight-processing centers of the brain act in error on this information, comparing the apparent size of the moon to the apparent size of the little objects and concluding that the moon must be huge to dwarf them so easily. It then serves up a perception in keeping with that conclusion. That makes the 14% edge a supermoon has over a standard issue full moon seem even larger. As Tyson points out, the illusion is especially pronounced in cities, because skyscrapers provide the same point of reference as houses and trees, and they do so even when the moon is well above the horizon.
(In case you want to shatter the moon illusion, NASA has a way. When the full moon is near the horizon, extend your arm and raise your index finger. The moon will appear to be about the same size as your fingernail. Now repeat the comparison when the moon is high in the sky; the fingernail and the moon will still be of equivalent sizes.)
If you feel like you’ve been hearing more about supermoons lately, you’re not wrong. Supermoons have become more common than they used to be—but not because the moon has gotten any closer to the Earth. Rather, it’s that astronomers, as well as NASA, have, since at least 2001, changed the standards of what constitutes a supermoon, defining it as a full moon that comes within 90% of perigee, rather than requiring it to reach that closest 226,000 mi. approach. That new standard has slowly caught on over the years with more and more moons earning the “super” label.
September’s supermoon, like all supermoons, will go by a nickname. A full moon in early July was dubbed a Buck Moon by Native Americans because it appears at the same time male, adult deer begin to grow new antlers. Early August brought us the Sturgeon Moon, another legacy from Native Americans, who chose the name because August is the peak fishing month for sturgeon in the Great Lakes. The supermoon that appeared in late August was known as the Blue Supermoon. The “blue” part was a gift not from Native Americans, but from amateur astronomer Hugh Pruett, who in 1946 wrote an article for Sky & Telescope magazine, and, for reasons never quite clear, chose the color blue to describe the second full moon in a month. Supermoons occur every three or four months, but a Super Blue Moon is much less common—happening, on average, just once a decade. The upcoming super moon on Sept. 29 is known as the Harvest Moon, a name conferred by both Native American and Colonial planters because that was the month in which they reaped their crops. The first use of “Harvest Moon” has been traced to 1706, when the Oxford English Dictionary published the name.
After this Harvest Moon passes below the horizon, the curtain will come down on all supermoons in 2023. The sky shows will resume next year, with three supermoons in succession: on Feb. 9, March 10, and April 8. They’re worth waiting for. Supermoons are stunning, fun, and entirely free—a little cosmic dance the Earth and moon have been performing for more than four billion years now.
A few years ago, I was in a cab in Boston and noticed a photo of a young girl that my driver had displayed on his dashboard. “Is that your daughter?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said with joyful pride. “I have more pictures, want to see?” I did. He handed me his phone and invited me to scroll through his photos. I “ooh”ed and “aah”ed over how adorable his four-year old girl was. We chatted. He told me she lived with her mom.
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“You don’t live with them?” I asked. “Nah,” he said. “Could I ask why not?” I continued. I knew this was nosy, so I quickly qualified it. “I’m an economist, and I study families, so I wonder about these kinds of things.” “I don’t know.” he shrugged. “We talk about it. If we save up some money, we might get married.”
I pressed further. “I don’t mean to pry,” I said slowly, “but if you guys get along and you both love your daughter, why don’t you live together as a family?” He became flustered—not impatient or angry, but genuinely flustered. He missed the exit, looked over his shoulder to get a better look at me, and asked, “Did my mom send you or something?”
This encounter—and a million other domestic arrangements that it describes—prompt an important question: Has the social normalization of raising children outside of a two-parent arrangement led to more children being raised in a one-parent household? Surely, yes. And has this trend served the best interests of children? Based on the evidence of how beneficial two parent (especially two biological parent) homes are for children, the answer is an unequivocal no.
This presents our modern American society with a challenge: we need to find ways to acknowledge the benefits of a two-parent family—including the important role that fathers play in their children’s lives—without coming across as shaming or blaming single mothers. By being honest about the benefits that a two-parent family home confers to children, we can break the pattern in which a desire to be inclusive of different family types too often leads to a reluctance to acknowledge the negative consequences of the rise in one-parent families and address it as a matter of public policy.
Research Shows Children Thrive in Married Parent Households
The evidence is clear, even if the punchline is uncomfortable: children are more likely to thrive— behaviorally and academically, and ultimately in the labor market and adult life—if they grow up with the advantages of a two-parent home. Numerous academic studies confirm that children raised in married parent homes are less likely to get in trouble in school or with the law; they are more likely to graduate high school and college; they are more likely to have higher income and be married themselves as adults. Research suggests that boys are especially disadvantaged by the absence of dads from their homes. These facts are indisputable. But there is disagreement among scholars about what to take away from them and what the policy implications are.
Some of these differences reflect the fact that parents who are married are already likely to be more successful and thus pass advantages down to their children. Those inclined to downplay the role of marriage often emphasize this point and conclude that we should thus not focus on marriage per se, but instead focus on shoring up government support to single-parent families. I disagree. We should be asking why it is that the most economically successful people in our society are so much more likely to be married and have the advantage of a spouse with whom to raise their children.
We should not be content with marriage and married parent families becoming yet another luxury good of the college-educated class and another source of disproportionate advantage for their children. Interviews conducted with low-income unmarried couples often suggest that many of these couples aim to be married and make their relationships work, but they face barriers to doing so. It should be a policy priority to help such couples achieve stable, healthy relationships, and to promote positive approaches to co-parenting that benefit their children.
Furthermore, the gaps in outcomes between children from married and single mother homes is not just reflective of more successful adults being more likely to be married. Gaps remain when comparing outcomes across the children of mothers of the same age, race, and education level. A lot of this reflects the basic fact that homes with two adults have two potential earners, and therefore have more income. Married parents also have more collective time, energy, and emotional bandwidth to give to their children. I agree that we need more public support to economically insecure families, but a government check is never going to make up for all the income and other types of support a loving, working second parent in the home would bring. Even in countries with much more generous welfare states than the U.S., family background matters for children’s outcomes. We should have a stronger safety net in the U.S., but we should also invest directly in parents and their ability to establish strong families.
Of course, some families would not be better off if the parents lived together, and some parents are not positive influences in their children’s lives. But we are no longer in a situation in the U.S. where children are raised by an unmarried or unpartnered parent only in rare or extenuating circumstances. Only 63 percent of U.S. children live in a home with married parents. The share being raised in a home with two parents, regardless of marital status, is only slightly higher—around 70 percent. Statistics show that many of these cohabiting arrangements will break up, bringing the burden of instability to children’s lives.
The share of children living with married parents is even lower among the children of parents who don’t have a four-year college degree; this is true overall, as well as within race and ethnic groups. The interaction of education, class, and race is quite determinant. The children of non-college educated Black mothers are at an especially high risk of living with only their mother—around 60 percent of children in that group live with only their mother. The gap in family structure between education and race groups both reflects and exacerbates inequality, and it threatens to entrench advantage and disadvantage across generations.
Are Men Not Marriageable?
Some observers see these trends and object to the idea that marriage itself is something we should be focused on as a matter of social policy. A frequent line of argument is that women are not marrying the fathers of their children because these men would not be good providers or partners.
Could it really be the case that so many American children have been borne of fathers who would not be positive contributors to the family if they were part of their household? If that is even close to the reality for men in America today, then we have a terrible crisis of men.
In fact, the evidence does suggest that part of the story of why marriage has declined outside the college-educated class in America—and consequently the share of children living without the benefits of two parents in their home has increased—is a response to the decade-long economic struggles of non-college educated men. Social science evidence points to an important role for the decline in the economically “marriageable male.” When a man is unlikely to be an economically reliable partner, marriage is not an attractive proposition. The decline in marriage in the U.S. since the 1980s reflects, in part, the declining economic position of non-college educated men (which is still a majority of U.S. men).
But the economic trends that have been punishing to many men in society have been amplified by a social acceptance of having and raising children outside a committed partnership—and these forces have not been good for children, or society more generally.
Social Norms Matter, and Are Malleable
It’s not just economics; social norms are also an important contributor to the rise of the single-parent household. Where social norms come from and how to change them are complicated questions. Academic evidence does give us some useful answers. For one, role models matter. Young people take inspiration and cues from trusted adults in their lives. Children, teens, and young adults will approach their own family formation in ways that are reflective of the examples and lessons they take from the adults around them.
There is also compelling evidence that people’s attitudes (and ultimately behaviors) are influenced by media content, even in the complicated sphere of family formation. For instance, economists have documented how the portrayal of family structures Brazilian telenovelas produced changes in the country’s family and fertility outcomes—a drop in fertility, a rise in divorce and separation—between 1965 and 1999. Similarly, the depictions of the difficulties associated with being a teen mom as shown on the MTV reality television show 16 and Pregnant led to a decline in rates of teen childbearing in the US.
Social messaging that comes organically in the form of entertainment and social media can have an impact on how people think and act when it comes to decisions about family and fertility.
Promoting Two Parent Households as Economic Policy
The decline in marriage, the corresponding high share of children living with only their mothers, the economic disadvantage and inequality that results is producing a cycle in desperate need of interruption. The U.S. needs to raise boys who are fit to be reliable marriage partners and nurturing, supportive fathers. We need to foster a societal expectation that fathers are present in their children’s lives and support them, financially and emotionally. I have no idea whether the cab driver I mentioned above would be a good father or partner. But he was obviously employed, and he seemed to love his daughter and her mother; he was also seemingly ambivalent about whether they should raise their daughter in a home together, and whether they were committed to each other as marriage partners.
Restoring the prevalence of marriage between parents outside the college educated class will require both economic and social changes. It will require bolstering the circumstances of men, so that they are more reliable marriage partners and fathers. In broad strokes, this will likely require heightened economic stability, but also addressing the multitude of barriers that make it hard for some men to form healthy relationships, including substance abuse, violence, criminal engagement, and other challenges. Restoring the prevalence of marriage will likely also require fostering a norm of marriage—or at least committed, long-term cohabitation—among parents. These are efforts that can be tackled on the federal, state, and local level through economic policy choices regarding married versus single people, as well as through the excellent work being done by non-profits and advocacy groups across the nation that help people learn to become stronger marriage partners and parents.
The economic data is clear: to make our nation’s economy stronger for all men, women and children, marriage and family structure must be acknowledged as a driving force of economic well-being. And we must promote positive, shame-free ways of changing our social and economic views on marriage to make improvements that help the nation now and in the decades ahead.
With its stacks of books and its wood-paneled walls, my professor’s office was as intimidating as it was clichéd. As a young divinity school student years ago, my efforts to schedule time with the professor through email had been a bit of a chore – this was not a pop-in appointment. And as the meeting began, I immediately sensed that my professor was very busy and that we would not be having an extended conversation. I remember feeling a bit disappointed as this realization dawned on me, as I came to understand that I would not be his new star pupil. I had, in my mind, very important intellectual queries to make of my professor, ones that stemmed from my own doubt and struggles regarding the truth of my Christian faith at the time. In the end, I was underwhelmed when the conversation didn’t provide the breathtaking revelations I’d hoped for. I left, instead, with some relatively uninspiring instructions from the professor: Go to church.
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I return to this moment whenever I read the various discussions and social media arguments concerning the “de-churching” of America, the dramatic decrease of Christian interest in attending worship and joining faith communities. My professor’s advice cut against the grain of this trend, one that was started accelerating in the 1990s and was certainly a reality in the university town where I was in school.
Now, as an educator, I also think about this moment whenever I consider the places my students today seek answers to their own pressing problems. And there is increasingly no more vexing example of this than the challenge of artificial intelligence (AI). AI programs like Chat GPT have sent higher education into a tizzy over the past year and are forcing dramatic reworkings of syllabi. This concern is usually framed as worry about plagiarism. But such programs also promise users (especially students) easy answers to challenging questions. This is an intensification of democratized internet trends, one that threatens to further upend confidence in less accessible intellectual authorities—whether books, courses, teachers, and yes, even sometimes the church.
I wonder now what my experience would have been like as a doubting student with AI programs like Chat GPT at my disposal. I was asking the kinds of questions that many students ask, about God, human existence, and truth, and I was considering radical changes to (even abandonment of) my old beliefs. Students today still ask these kinds of questions, though they increasingly have new options as to where to go to find answers. Indeed, there are now even AI programs designed precisely for Christians like myself who had hard questions about faith, programs that let users conveniently “text with Jesus.”
De-churching and AI seem to me to be related phenomena. Both are modern attempts to exceed frustrating limits. For one, church can be a burden. This can be true of time (we have to get ahead at work, our kids have to do travel soccer), amusement (church is often boring), and doctrine (Christians believe wild stuff, it turns out, and those beliefs can motivate some to do awful things). Similarly, AI tools promise to broaden our knowledge and democratize it for everyone, not just those who can afford a degree or take the time to wade through a complex text. Breaking away from these various constraints promises a freer life.
Especially when compared to my professor’s advice, AI tools like Chat GPT would seem to have a leg up in every way in dealing with deconstructive doubts. These tools operate at breathtaking speed and cut through jargon. Unlike my busy professor, AI is ready to talk with you anytime, about anything, including all the questions you could possibly ask about religious faith. (And Chat GPT’s responses aren’t altogether bad. Believe me, I’ve tried.) It certainly would have been much easier for me as a doubting Christian to endlessly input my various queries into a laptop on my dark nights of the soul, rather than sit down with a face-to-face meeting with my teacher. AI and its democratized technological parallels offer so much, and in that, perhaps, it shows how obsolete traditional forms of inquiry have become. This is especially true given that, in my case, the advice I was offered was to do little more than to return to my religious community, a place of mundane familiarity.
And yet, the 20 minutes in the confines of that wood-paneled room were as close to life changing as anything I had ever experienced. I had told the professor that I wasn’t sure I believed in God or could be a Christian anymore, and I sputtered through my various reasons. The professor answered, not by giving me any new information or offering an airtight, comprehensive explanation. Instead, he asked me where I felt closest to God in recent years. I said that occasionally I had felt close to God at my church, and sometimes at the prison ministry where I volunteered. Both were places where I was surrounded by people (many, though not all, Christians) who gave me strength or inspiration. But, that wasn’t of much use, I thought to myself, because I knew that collective illusions were likely influencing my understanding of reality. What I wanted, so I thought, was accessible and certain knowledge. I sought a comprehensive system for making sense of the world that would eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) doubt and give me the intellectual stability I craved. And I wanted it to deal with problems as they came up, as I kept finding new objections to faith. AI chat tools didn’t exist then, but what they currently promise was, in effect, exactly the kind of solution I was seeking.
By contrast, my professor’s recommendation was for me to simply keep going to the places where I felt like maybe I was experiencing God, or at least where I had in the past, to be persistent there, and to trust that eventually all would be well. My professor knew, I think, that truth is something that is lived out, not simply obtained through visual perception and mental assent. And he knew that truthful living ultimately meant encounters with others, both fellow creatures and the Creator we attempt to speak about and connect to together. So, I went back to church. And, because of my professor’s advice, and because of the people who met me at church and in prison, I’m still here, somehow doubting and believing all at once.
The point I want to make here is not so much about faith amidst doubt (important though that may be), but about the alternatives set before us as people living in a moment where religious belonging matters less and technologies like AI promise more. The forsaking of church and the embrace of AI both indicate we want to exceed limits. By comparison, the professorial advice I obtained was limited in every way. My professor didn’t try to give me a giant stack of books, and he didn’t try to handle every possible question I might have had. Indeed, he didn’t tell me to doanything differently. Instead, he told me to return to a space where I was already sensing something true, some slight taste of the good life. But in that conversation, with all of its limits, and in the church I returned to, seeds were being planted that could grow in unpredictable ways.
Just as church can be endlessly disappointing, technologies like AI can be quite satisfying—but superficially so. It’s important to remember that this is not the satisfaction of knowledge gained through a life well lived. It also is not the sense of the possibility of divine presence in collective worship, or the transformative knowledge of a tradition or community that only comes through personal, persistent encounters. AI offers information but provides no relational or affective context for helping a person understand and experience why such acquisition of such data might be part of a larger process of transformation, growth, and wonder. It offers information, but not formation.
Being rightly formed in Christian community is hard. The people in our churches are broken; their doctrines are confusing and strange; and at their worst these places risk exacerbating all kinds of harmful habits and assumptions. And yet, in those spaces of gathering, with those pursuing God together, I think we somehow can find hope for truthful lives well lived.
Rebekah Kendall, a New York City public school teacher, used her February 2021 break to do something few women ever get to do: she proposed to her boyfriend, Bilig Bayar, an assistant principal at a different New York City school, on a beach at a resort in Jamaica. “I got down on one knee, did the whole thing,” says Kendall.
She had scoped the perfect spot while Bayar was at the gym, set up her phone to take pictures under the pretense she wanted vacation snaps, and bought a fancy watch to give him instead of a ring. “I really had the element of surprise on my side,” she says. “He had no expectation of it and he was just shocked and so elated and it was really special and really fun.” (He said yes.)
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She shared her plans with her friends beforehand, and their reaction was muted. “They didn’t try to talk me out of it, but they definitely didn’t have the reaction that I would have liked,” says Kendall. “They were like, ‘That’s … that’s so you!’ Like, ‘Good for you!’” She told her mother in advance but not her father: “I didn’t really know the protocol on how to ask you for my own hand in marriage to give to someone else,” she told him.
The process by which men and women meet, mate, and manufacture more humans is undergoing a radical realignment. Half a century ago two-thirds of Americans ages 25 to 50 were living with a spouse and a smattering of offspring. Today, that fraction is closer to one-third. Whereas marriage used to be an institution widely adopted across all socioeconomic levels, today it is much more prevalent among people who are wealthy and educated. About one in a hundred marriages in the U.S.are between people of the same sex. An unknown but growing fraction of them, including the former Mayor of New York City’s, are openly nonmonogamous.
But plenty of things about the process of getting married have remained stubbornly unchanged. Men still buy women expensive engagement rings, even when a couple already shares expenses. American women married to men continue to take their husband’s last names, at a rate of 80:20. After a lull during the pandemic, the wedding industry is back in the black or, um, white. And the overwhelming number of proposals are stillmade by men.
Data on how many women propose is not robust. But Michele Velazquez, who helps plan proposals with her company The Heart Bandits, says she has seen no increase in the number of women proposing in the 13 years she has been in business. She estimates that only three women from heterosexual couples contact her per year.
The latest figures from the U.S. CensusBureau say that there are only 90 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women. More women than ever are earning money of their own and thus less reliant on men for financial stability. And most women are already living with the men they are going to marry before any proposal is plotted. These market conditions—an undersupply of men, an ability to provide, and the willing presence of a local candidate—would seem to clear the way for women to do the asking. Yet they don’t.
What prevents a woman who wishes to marry her partner from proposing to him?Is it mortification, the suggestion that a woman had to force the issue because she was not desirable enough to be chosen? Is it the unspoken prohibition on any act that whiffs of female aggression or ambition? Does it seem forward and loose, as if these women were throwing themselves at men? “Sometimes women are embarrassed to admit they proposed,” says Julie Gottman, co-founder of The Gottman Institute and co-author of the marriage-advice staple, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. “It makes them seem pushy and controlling, and perhaps not loved enough to receive a proposal.”
She points to the mesmerizing effect of years of saturation in romantic fairy tales. “As much as we’ve tried to establish new, more egalitarian standards for ourselves, those images and their influence have seeped into our bones,” says Gottman. “It’s nice to be begged to marry. That’s really being wanted.”
For Aaron Renn, a conservative thinker and writer at the American Reformer, the converse is also true. To ask someone to marry you is to risk being spurned. “I think men have traditionally always just had this understanding that they have to bear the risk of rejection,” he says. Women hold the high ground in that encounter, and they may not wish to cede it. “Do you want to be the party that is in the position to decide: ‘I accept or reject,’” asks Renn, “or do you want to be the party who is at risk of being accepted or rejected?”
When New Yorkers Amy Shack Egan and John Egan decided to get married in 2017, they opted for a third alternative. They both love sunsets, so they researched the best places to see the sun set and planned a covert trip to the Grand Canyon. They flew to Los Angeles, splurged on a convertible, and drove to their chosen spot where, as the sun went down, they each read something they’d written about why they wanted to spend their lives together.
“We drove up and I remember thinking: ‘It’s that very rare moment in your life when you know everything is different when you come back to this car,’” says Shack Egan. They each bought their own engagement rings (Shack Egan’s was a chunky turquoise) and surprised each other with gifts. She bought him an outdoor couples’ massage. He bought her a couples’ skydive, because of the metaphorical leap they were taking and “because I’ve always wanted to go and he’s terrified of heights.” They had a week alone together before announcing the news to family and friends, who Shack Egan said were pleased, if a bit puzzled by the methodology.
Did she not want the surprise proposal? “I hear proposal stories every day, and the thing I hear the most is that it’s never a total surprise,” says Shack Egan, who runs the wedding-planning company Modern Rebel. “The conversation around marriage should never be a surprise. If it’s a surprise, that’s not a great sign.” Couples who come to Modern Rebel, which calls its events “love parties,” usually want to think outside the box when planning their nuptials, but she has noticed that a proposal from a guy has proved to be a hardy perennial.
Both Shack Egan and Kendall would call themselves feminists but say their motivation was to do something romantic and meaningful and fun rather than strike a blow for equality. Shack Egan told her partner that if he had always dreamed of proposing, she was happy to fulfill that dream. Bayar also surprised Kendall with a proposal of his own a few weeks later, by a waterfall. She says that Bayar had already told her in a hundred different ways that he’d like to spend his life with her, but having had divorce in her family of origin, she was the reluctant one. “I sort of came to the realization that it just is a weird thing that we expect that, like, because he, I don’t know, has a penis, that he’s meant to be the one to prostrate himself on one knee.”
Rosemary Hopcroft, professor emeritus of sociology at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, thinks the male proposal has been deeply carved into society over millennia. Women want men to propose, with a ring, she says, because historically they needed a mate who could provide for them and their offspring. She points to studies that suggest that across different cultures, women value partners who are providers more than men do. “There’s a psychological and emotional reason why women still want their husbands to provide and that doesn’t seem to have changed,” even as women have become financially independent, she says. “It’s obviously not rational. There is no need for it. But we’re not just rational actors. We’re emotional.”
Shack Egan sees couples every day who are rewriting the rules of weddings and she thinks that’s healthy. “We still kind of hold fast to some bridal traditions,” she says. “I think if most people stop to think about it, they might realize, ‘Yeah, I want parts of this. I don’t want parts of this.’”
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Medics at a burn centre in Yerevan, Armenia, attend to a patient after an explosion at a fuel depot in the Nagorno-Karabakh region © Hayk Baghdasaryan/Photolure/Reuters
Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan has publicly criticised Russia © Armenian Government/AFP/Getty Images
A protest last week in Yerevan against Azerbaijan’s military actions in the Nagorno-Karabakh region © Narek Aleksanyan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Smoke rises from a fuel depot after an explosion near Stepanakert on Monday © Siranush Sargsyan’s Twitter account/AP
