Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 08.12.21:
• A group of relatives of the missing and captured servicemen have spent the night at the entrance to the building of the National Assembly (NA) of Armenia.
“We haven't gone home since yesterday; we spent the whole night here,” Arsen Ghukasyan, the relative of a missing soldier, told Armenian News-NEWS.am.
A large number of police officers have been stationed at the entrance to the NA since this morning.
A group of families of the missing and captured Armenian servicemen had protested in front of the main government building Tuesday, and also closed off the Tigran Mets Avenue section which enters the Republic Square and runs along the main government building.
They were demanding that NA speaker Alen Simonyan come and answer for calling the captive servicemen "deserters."
• Nora Martirosyan’s “Should the Wind Drop” feature film about Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) has been submitted to the 79th edition of the Golden Globe Awards of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, informed the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA).
The movie has been submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film category.
• Granting the petition by the prosecutor's office, the court on cases of confiscation of illegal property has imposed attachment on the properties of a number of former high-ranking officials and their relatives, Armenian News-NEWS.am has learned the Prosecutor General's Office of Armenia.
The attachment was imposed as a means of securing a claim for confiscation of illegal property.
• The foreign ministers of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries (Russia, US, and France) have issued a joint statement on the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov, and French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian, representing the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries, express support for the resumption of direct dialogue between Armenia and Azerbaijan under the auspices of the Minsk Group Co-Chairs.
The Co-Chair countries call on the sides to continue the dialogue between the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan begun at meetings held in New York in September and Paris in November, as well as to continue contacts at the leadership level to promote a lasting and sustainable peace in the region.
• As of Wednesday morning, 410 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 341,468 in the country.
Also, 10 more deaths from COVID-19 were registered, making the respective total 7,728 cases.