May 8, 2019 UPDATE

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Newsroom, 08.05.2019, 20:15

SUMMIT The
EU informal summit in Sibiu on Thursday, during the Romanian half-yearly
presidency of the EU Council, will remain as a remarkable moment in the history
of the European project – Romanian president Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday. According
to him, the summit will have to provide a clear common vision on the EU’s
future. During the summit, President Iohannis is expected to present
Bucharest’s vision over the strategic programme for the following five years,
underlining the fact that the agenda of the political players must be the same
as that of the European citizens. The European Council president Donald Tusk
has proposed the participants to adopt a joint statement, which should convey a
message of trust and unity.

AMBASSADOR Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu on Wednesday asked the
country’s president Klaus Iohannis to recall Romanian ambassador to the United
States, George Maior. A communiqué issued by the Foreign Affairs Ministry,
shows the proposal came after an analysis of the diplomat’s mandate, whose
actions do not allow him to promote in a credible manner Romania’s interests in
the USA, which is a strategic partner of Romania’s. In an official report in
April, a Parliament Committee in charge of controlling the activity of the
Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) whose director Maior was before his mandate
as ambassador in Washington, accused the latter of having used the Service in
his personal interest. The Foreign Ministry is also evoking the recently
published protocols, which the SRI had concluded with Romania’s judicial
authorities, through which severe violations of the fundamental rights and
liberties of the Romanian citizens or the country’s interests were done. President
Iohannis has announced he is going to make a decision in this respect upon the
EU summit in Sibiu.

ARREST Radu Mazre, the former mayor of Constanta, a Black Sea port in
Romania, was apprehended on Wednesday in Madagascar upon an arrest warrant the
Romanian authorities issued through the Interpol. The announcement has been
made by judicial sources in Bucharest. Mazare has been charged with several
crimes in Romania but some files haven’t been completed yet. An international
search warrant was issued in his name in February after he had been indicted in
a file on fictitious land retrocession. The former mayor left Romania in
December 2017 after claiming that he had been subjected to political pressure
in the penal cases against him.

TENNIS Romanian
Simona Halep, the world’s number three tennis player has qualified for the
quarter finals of the WTA tournament in Madrid after a two-set win, 6-0, 6-0
against Viktoria Kuzmova of Slovakia. Simona will be up against Ashleigh Barty
of Australia in the quarters on Thursday. We recall that Halep won the Madrid
Tournament twice, in 2016 and 2017. Also on Wednesday Romanian pair Irina Begu
/ Simona Halep was outperformed 6-3, 6-3 by Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina
Siniakova of the Czech Republic in the round of 16 of the women’s doubles.
Already qualified for the quarters, Irina Begu and Mihaela Buzarnescu of
Romania will be taking on Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia and Vera Zvonareva of
Russia on Thursday.

(translated by bill)