Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as 14.01.22:

• The Armenian peacekeepers of the CSTO have left Kazakhstan for their homeland, RIA Novosti reported, citing the press service of the Russian defense ministry.

"The personnel and equipment of the units of the CSTO collective peacekeeping forces from the Republic of Armenia, which were carrying out the tasks of protection of socially significant facilities in the Republic of Kazakhstan, are returning home," the respective statement reads, in part.

It is added that the Russian military transport planes have been used for the Armenian, Belarusian, and Tajik peacekeepers’ return home.

• French Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nathalie Loiseau, chairwoman of the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Security and Defence, has reacted sharply to the tweet by Azerbaijani Ambassador Rahman Mustafayev, who had posted Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's statement that Baku “will not allow" the OSCE Minsk Group to engage in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

"Mr. Ambassador, diplomacy is first and foremost about respecting the country where you have the honor to serve. France is the co-chair of the Minsk Group, and you are pretending to reject it. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not settled, the ceasefire regime is not observed. Three Armenians died yesterday," Loiseau wrote Thursday.

• Russian peacekeepers have transferred to the Armenian Armed Forces shepherd Surik Matevosyan of Tegh village of Syunik Province.

The Azerbaijanis had abducted the shepherd and about 500 of his sheep while he was grazing them in Tegh village, and forcibly taken him toward their side—in the direction of Tsitsernavank village.

• The delegations of Armenia and Turkey have arrived in the Russian foreign ministry reception house in Moscow, where the first meeting of the two countries' special representatives on normalization of bilateral relations will take place, RIA Novosti reported.

The special representative of Armenia is deputy speaker of parliament Ruben Rubinyan, and the special representative of Turkey is former ambassador to US Serdar Kilic.

• The President of the Greek Community of Melbourne and Victoria, Bill Papastergiadis, and the Cypriot Community of Melbourne and Victoria, Theo Theophanous, with the support of the Pontian Federations of Australia, sent a letter to the Prime Minister urging the government to officially recognize the genocides committed by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 against Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christian minorities, neoskosmos reported.

This followed a motion passed unanimously by the House of Representatives on November 29, 2021, calling for the government to officially recognize the acts of genocide.

• As of Friday morning, 273 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 347,084 in the country, Armenian News-NEWS.am has learned from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also, one more death from COVID-19 was registered, making the respective total 8,015 cases.

• Instagram became the world's most downloaded app in the fourth quarter of 2021, overtaking TikTok. According to TechCrunch, it has been downloaded nearly 180 million times.

TikTok, which had been the all-time leader in downloads since the spring of 2020, when it was overtaken by Zoom, came in second in the rankings.

The publication attributes this to the delayed effect of the app ban in India, which was announced in July 2020.