January 3, 2015
A roundup of domestic and international news
România Internațional, 02.01.2015, 12:16
The population of the neighbouring Republic of Moldova, a former Soviet republic with a majority Romanian-speaking population, has decreased by almost half a million people in the last 10 years alone. Preliminary results of last year’s census show that about 2.9 million people live on Moldova’s territory, without taking into account the inhabitants of Transdniester, a pro-Russian breakaway region in eastern Moldova. Those over 330,000 Moldovans living abroad have been included in the census. Out of the total population, 56.8% consider themselves Moldovans, 23.2% say they are Romanians, 7.6% ay they are Ukrainians and 5.46% say they are Russians. Little over 40% of those who took part in the census said the language they speak is Romanian, 38.4% said is Moldovan and 13.2% said they speak Russian. The results of the census are only partial, because not all the people interviewed agreed to answer the questions, so information about them will be found from administrative sources.
Romanian meteorologists have today warned against heavy snowfall, blizzard and wind, valid for the entire country starting this evening until Monday night. Maximum temperatures today range from minus 3 to plus 6 degrees Celsius. The noon reading in Bucharest was 5 degrees Celsius.
The AirAsia airliner flying from Indonesia to Singapore with 162 people on board, which crashed in the Java Sea, did not have permission to use the flight path it used that day, the Indonesian Transport Ministry announced. 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, one Briton, one French, one Malaysian and one Singaporean, alongside a 7-member crew were on board the plain. As many as 30 corpses have so far been retrieved from the sea. Search operations are still under way to retrieve all bodies and to find the plain’s black boxes.
The fight against traffickers who use all possible means to enter the EU will be one of the priorities of the community bloc this year, a European Commission spokesperson announced, in the context of an increasing number of cargo-ships transporting hundreads of migrants to Europe being reported. The European Commission hailed he the Italian authorities’ efforts, who managed to take control on Friday, of a ship with 450 migrants on board. The operetion was a difficult one with the Italian Coast Guard having to use a helicopter to get on board the ship.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest on Friday, in protest at what they call the failure of the political elite headed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Protesters voiced concern at a policy that brings Hungary away from the West and strengthens ties with Russia. Protests have been held in Hungary since October 2014 when the Orban government came up with a planned tax on using the internet. The draft law proposed to tax Internet providers for each gigabyte of data traffic. The project was eventually abandoned, but protests continued to be staged against corruption and Orban’s strengthening ties with Vladimir Putin.
