Armenian News - NEWS.am presents a daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 25.05.2020:
· Armenia on Monday had a record single-day spike in COVID-19 confirming 452 cases in a day, bringing the total number to 7,113.
In the meantime, six patients have died of COVID-19 in the past day. The death toll has reached 87.
The total number of tests conducted in Armenia is 51,594.
According to the latest data, 3,145 people have recovered so far.
· Today, 46 COVID-19 tests were carried out at an orphanage in Yerevan, 15 of which were positive, Sona Martirosyan, spokesperson for the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, told NEWS.am.
"Nine of the infected are children of the institution, 6 are employees. No one from the institution was hospitalized because no one has any symptoms,” Martirosyan added.
· A heated discussion took place in media amid Armenian health minister Arsen Torosyan's statement on the COVID-19 situation in Georgia.
According to some Armenian media reports, Torosyan believes that small number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Georgia can be explained by in Georgia can be explained by shortcomings in terms of the methodology and quality of tests carried out in the neighboring country.
As Georgian FM David Zalkaliani noted on Saturday he had received a call from the Georgian embassy in Yerevan and was informed that the Armenian health ministry called the embassy and expressed their regret that Torosyan's statement, which was incorrectly interpreted, upset Georgian colleagues.
The case concerns the Azerbaijani presidential pardon given to a convicted murderer and his release following his transfer from Hungary to Azerbaijan to serve the rest of his sentence.
Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant in the Azerbaijani military, was extradited on August 31, 2012, from Hungary, where he was serving a life sentence—and with no expression of either regret or remorse—for the premeditated axe murder of Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep, during a NATO Partnership for Peace program in Budapest back in 2004.
As expected, Ramil Safarov’s return to Baku was welcomed, as was his act of murder, by the officials of president Ilham Aliyev’s government and much of Azerbaijani society, and the Azerbaijani president immediately granted him a pardon.
· American-Armenian musician Serj Tankian, who is the lead singer of System of a Down, said that the band’s concert scheduled for 2020 in Yerevan will not take place due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tankian noted that their get-together with the Armenian fans is expected to take place in the summer of 2021; he announced this during a webinar.
