A roundup of local and international news
In Romania, drought has affected large surface areas covered by farming land and damaged at least a quarter of this year's crops, the president of the League of Agricultural Producers Associations, Laurentiu Baciu, told Radio Romania. He said drought caused most damage to the corn production, as well as the sunflower and soybean crops. Producers have help from the authorities, but for the moment they were only promised aid for small-scale crops. In the case of large crops, the agriculture ministry needs to come up with more comprehensive funding schemes, which require the approval of the European Union.
Romania, together with Germany and Bulgaria, proposed a revised Black Sea strategy that may constitute a first step towards creating a European Union Black Sea strategy, said Romania's foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu. In an interview to Realitatea TV channel on Saturday, he said Romania also proposed the creation of a new strategy to approach NATO's eastern and southern partners in the run up to the NATO summit in Warsaw in 2016. Aurescu also said that Romania is not a target for Russia because the former is a member of NATO and an attack on Romania is tantamount to an attack against NATO.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry said after talks with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Choukri in Cairo on Sunday that if implemented, the nuclear agreement with Iran would make the Middle East safer. After Egypt, Kerry travels to Doha, where he is due to meet his counterparts from six Sunni monarchies in the Gulf area worried about the nuclear agreement with Iran. Kerry's tour ends on August 8th and also takes him to South-East Asia.
The situation of the Tartar population in the Crimean Peninsula, which was annexed by Russia last year, was the main topic of the World Congress of Tartars held in Ankara, Turkey. Around 500 delegations of Tartar organisations from across the world, including Romania, attended the congress. They called on the international community to step in and put an end to Russia's undemocratic actions against the ethnic Tartars in Crimea. The representatives of the Democratic Union of Muslim Tartars in Romania reiterated their support for finding a solution to the problems faced by the Tartars in Crimea. Most of Romania's 25,000 Tartars live in Dobruja, in the south-east, a province that was under Ottoman rule for hundreds of years.
The European Commission supports the resolution of the European Parliament on the recognition of the genocide against the Roma during World War Two and the establishment of a Roma Holocaust Memorial Day in Europe on the 2nd of August. Romania's prime minister Victor Ponta said his government welcomes the initiative of the Roma civil society in Romania to commemorate together this tragic event in world history and urged all Romanian citizens to observe a minute's silence for the victims. On the 2nd of August 1944, almost 3,000 Roma men, women and children from the concentration camp in Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis. The Roma are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe.
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