Gagik Tsarukian, an influential businessman leading Armenia’s second largest governing party, urged voters to more actively participate in the next national elections on Tuesday as he sought to drum up greater public support in the northwestern Shirak region.
About 100 Turks rallied in Istanbul on Saturday in a first-ever public commemoration of the World War One-era mass killings and deportations of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey that was organized by a local human rights group.
A once powerful organization uniting thousands of Armenian veterans of the Nagorno-Karabakh war has further underscored its loyalty to President Serzh Sarkisian by admitting senior government figures into its ranks in at least one Armenian region.
An independent television station based in Armenia’s second city of Gyumri alleged a fresh government attempt to force it off the air on Friday after tax authorities froze its assets and bank accounts over allegedly unpaid taxes.
Taxi drivers and gold trade workers held separate protests in Armenia on Thursday condemning what they see as unfair tax pressures threatening their further business operations.
President Serzh Sarkisian criticized on Wednesday the quality of the renewed reconstruction of Armenia’s northern regions devastated by the 1988 earthquake, which seems to be increasingly falling behind schedule.
A government-connected entrepreneur who controls lucrative imports of basic foodstuffs to Armenia is poised to significantly step up his involvement in manufacturing with the ongoing construction of a major sugar plant in the northwestern Shirak region.
Officials insisted on Monday that the renewed reconstruction of regions devastated by the 1988 earthquake is going according to plan as Armenia marked the 21st anniversary of the calamity that killed 25,000 people and left hundreds of thousands of others homeless.
Three police officers in Armenia’s second largest city of Gyumri were sentenced to seven years in prison on Thursday on chargers of bribery which they strongly denied.
Several dozen young supporters of the opposition Armenian National Congress (HAK) marched to the Office of the Prosecutor-General in Yerevan on Friday to demand the release of a fellow activist who was arrested after distributing opposition leaflets last month.
Police in Armenia’s northwestern province of Shirak have detained a group of young men, among them the son of the controversial mayor of Gyumri, after a local villager was fired at on Thursday evening.
Four more opposition members, including former Deputy Prosecutor-General Gagik Jahangirian, were released from prison on Tuesday in accordance with a general amnesty declared by the Armenian authorities.
Traveling to Yerevan from other parts of Armenia by public transport was all but impossible ahead of a fresh opposition rally held in the capital on Monday evening.
Hundreds of local government officials and other people were bused to Yerevan from Armenia’s second and third largest cities on Sunday in what the ruling Republican Party (HHK) called a show of support for its victory in the municipal elections in the capital.
In what has become a pattern, the Armenian authorities again seriously restricted transport communication between Yerevan and the rest of the country ahead of an opposition rally in the capital on Friday.
