Armenian News - NEWS.am presents a daily digest of top news as of 17.01.2020:
· Georgi Kutoyan, Armenian NSS ex-head, was found dead Friday in a Yerevan apartment.
According to the Hraparak daily, when the police entered the apartment, they found an empty brandy bottle next to the corpse, as well as Kutoyan's personal pistol. The shot was fired from that weapon, and in the mouth.
According to the website, it is not known yet whose house the body of the former NSS director was found in, as according to Kutoyan’s declaration of property and assets, he had only one apartment and it was somewhere else in Yerevan.
However, as Artur Melikyan, deputy chair of the Armenian Investigative Committee, noted, according to preliminary data, his wife was the first person to find him dead.
As Special Investigation Service noted, he was not questioned along the lines of the SIS criminal cases.
· Armenian army soldier was injured at a military outpost of one of the military units located in northeastern direction on Thursday afternoon, the Armenian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
According to Defense Ministry’s spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan, Arthur Mezhlumyan sustained abdominal gunshot wound.
“The wound is not life threatening,” he added.
· Gazprom Armenia might submit a bid to the Public Services Regulatory Commission to raise the natural gas tariff for consumers, said Chairman of the Public Services Regulatory Commission Garegin Baghramyan.
He said that even though the statement on no price increase concerns the price of natural gas sold on the border, this doesn’t mean that Gazprom Armenia can’t submit a bid to the Commission. When the price of natural gas sold on the border rose in 2019, Armenia’s government officials declared that the natural gas tariff wouldn’t go up for consumers, and it didn’t.
Baghramyan noted that the government is still negotiating with Gazprom Armenia to make sure there is no increase in the natural gas tariff.
· Armenian Canadian woman believed to have been one of the last Canadians to have survived the Armenian genocide died on Thursday, four months shy of her 105th birthday.
She born in Turkey in 1915. At the start of the 1915 deportations, the members of her extended family gather and find refuge in the mountains and then descend into the gorge! It is there that she was born. After Eugenie’s birth her mother, exhausted, died in a place her daughter would never know.
An Armenian couple took her to Egypt, and she spent her early teens in Cairo, where she met her husband, Garabed Kokorian. Eugenie Papazian had 5 children, 9 grandchildren, 14 great grandchildren and 1 great-great-grandchild.
· Yerevan is ranked 380th among 440 cities worldwide with the highest cost of living, reports by Data group Numbeo suggest. Yerevan left behind capital cities of the neighboring Georgia and Azerbaijan. Baku and Tbilisi are ranked 390th and 404th respectively.
According to the Index, Switzerland's Zurich, Basel, Lausanne, Geneva and Bern are the most expensive cities in the world.
· The US treated 11 of its troops for symptoms of concussion after an Iranian missile attack on an Iraqi base where U.S. forces were stationed, Reuters reported.
The attack was retaliation for a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad on Jan. 3 that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
According to Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, American clowns claim they are standing behind Iranians but they all lie. Missiles fired at US base revealed the Iranian nation’s true feeling towards the US, he added.
· The Senate has officially launched the US President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Seven lawmakers approved by the House will act as prosecutors in the Senate, Voice of America reported.
Among the impeachment managers are Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler.
The trial will begin on January 21 and is expected to last several weeks.