A 15-year old boy with good reason for not saying his name is talking about his experience at Yerevan's Special School No. 18.

"God forbid what will happen if they catch you when you escape," he says. "Muradyan was stripping us, pouring water on us and whipping us. If we decided to escape then we'd just as well have dug a grave for ourselves. Once I escaped at night but they caught me. The night man put a piece of parquet on my hands and stood on that parquet.

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March 2003: The incumbent president of Armenia is re-elected in a critically flawed election. Thousands fill the icy streets of Yerevan to shout their protests and vows of overthrow. But soon they retire to the passivity of pre-election status quo, sputtering into silence after a few relatively harmless weeks.

November 2003: Thousands march in the capital of Georgia, Armenia's northern neighbor, to protest blatantly rigged parliamentary elections. By the end of the month, Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze has quit following a bloodless democratic coup; in early January, a dynamic young U.S.-educated lawyer is overwhelmingly elected the country's new president, creating an opportunity for real change.

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On January 17, after a year and a half of being "dark", the doors of Yerevan's House of Opera and Ballet after Spendiaryan reopened.

With curiosity and nostalgia hundreds of people were examining the renovated building, evaluating, admiring the columns with new marble slabs, criticizing that the floor is not varnished and were looking with surprise at the sparkling white chandelier, which before was so dusty that it seemed to be gray.

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A new initiative by an Armenian diocese is making answers to spiritual questions as easy as a click of a mouse.

Want to know the Church's position on gender equality? Looking for forgiveness for extramarital indiscretion? Need absolution for un-confessed sin? Log on to www.araratian-tem.am.

For the past month, the Araratian Patriarchal Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church has been helping answer spiritual needs through its Armenian Virtual Priest feature found at its website.

By sending email (press@araratian-tem.am), the faithful or merely the confused can "speak" to a priest in a form of e-counseling that is a first in the local Armenian Church.

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Thirteen volumes of the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia are carefully leaned against each other in the bookcase of Hovhannes Aivazyan's workroom. Next to the older ones are volumes published within the past decade.

They are evidence of a man who has a special regard for the collection of facts and figures.

"Encyclopedias are not like newspapers and magazines, they cannot go out of date and people cannot say that they don't need them anymore," Aivazyan says. "Each encyclopedia never loses its value regardless of when it was published."

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