Electoral authorities in Armenia have invalidated the official results of Sunday’s municipal elections in three Yerevan precincts and asked prosecutors to investigate what they said was serious fraud committed there. (UPDATED)
President Serzh Sarkisian on Monday welcomed the course and official results of the weekend mayoral elections in Yerevan, saying that they marked a “serious step forward” in the elimination of Armenia’s culture of electoral fraud.
Voting started on Sunday morning in the first municipal elections in Yerevan in almost two decades that will determine the city’s next mayor and ascertain the current balance of forces in Armenian politics.
The Armenian police have made several arrests in connection with a weekend explosion near the Yerevan apartment of Gagik Khachatrian, head of the State Revenue Committee.
President Serzh Sarkisian said on Thursday that he will declare an amnesty for dozens of imprisoned opposition members only if Armenia’s leading political groups prove that there is strong public support for such a move.
President Serzh Sarkisian insisted on Friday that Turkey may still agree to unconditionally normalize relations with Armenia soon despite its leaders’ renewed linkage between Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Campaigning for the May 31 mayoral polls in Yerevan has gone into full swing, with the main election contenders holding rallies and other gathering on a virtually daily basis.
Armenia will start building a new nuclear power station in place of its Metsamor plant by the beginning of 2011, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Armen Movsisian said on Monday.
President Serzh Sarkisian visited the Nairit chemical factory in Yerevan on Thursday as the death toll from at least two explosions that ripped through it the previous evening rose to four.
At least three people were killed and about two dozen others injured in two powerful explosions at Armenia’s largest chemical company on Thursday.
An Australian engineering company has been chosen to manage the planned construction of a new nuclear power station that should replace Armenia’s aging Metsamor plant by 2017, officials said on Thursday.
The shortfall in Armenia’s state revenues eased considerably last month because of improved tax collection, Gagik Khachatrian, head of the State Revenue Committee (SRC), said on Thursday.
Armenian law-enforcement authorities are doing their best to stop periodical attacks on local journalists mostly critical of the government, a senior police official claimed on Friday.
Nver Mnatsakanian, a prominent television journalist, has become the latest target of increasingly frequent violent attacks on Armenian reporters which are largely going unpunished.
Armenia backed out of NATO-led military exercises in Georgia because of pro-Azerbaijani statements on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict made by the alliance’s outgoing secretary general, Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian said on Wednesday.
Hundreds of thousands of people silently marched to a hilltop memorial in Yerevan on Friday in an annual remembrance of more than one million of fellow Armenians killed in Ottoman Turkey in what is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) could go as far as to pull out of Armenia’s governing coalition if the upcoming municipal elections in Yerevan are marred by “blatant” irregularities, the party’s top election candidate warned on Friday.
