October 16, 2014 UPDATE
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Roxana Vasile, 16.10.2014, 12:15
Romanian judoka Corina Caprioriu on Thursday reaped the second gold medal for Romania in the first day of the Judo Grand Prix competition underway in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The Romanian has outperformed Camila Minakawa of Israel in the finals of the 57-kilogram category. Earlier, Andreea Chitu, from the Romanian delegation had defeated Tsolmon Adyasmbuu of Mongolia in the finals of the 52-kilogram category. The judo tournament in Tashkent, which has 100 thousand dollars in prize money and has brought together 282 judokas from 42 countries, is counting towards the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016.
Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors on Thursday called for the preventive detention of six persons, including two judges, involved in the illegal return of forests. The call came after a series of round-the-clock searches and hearings. Among suspects there are Social-Democrat MPs from the present ruling coalition as well as Prince Paul, an illegitimate grandson of Romania’s former king Carol the second, and his wife. The illegal retrocession of tens of thousands hectares of forests has allegedly caused over 300 million euros in prejudices to the National Forest Administration Romsilva. Large-scale searches were caried out also on Thursday in another legal case dubbed ‘The Microsoft File’ on alleged preferential IT license granting. Nine former ministers from both the left and right-wing coalitions are involved in this case.
The European Union will soon start to verify the efficiency of anti-Ebola checking on airports in the three West-African countries most affected by the epidemic — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The announcement was made by the European commissioner for health Tonio Borg at the end of a ministerial conference in Brussels on Thursday. In a joint videoconference on Wednesday, US president Barack Obama, French president Francois Hollande, German chancellor Angela Merkel and the Prime Ministers of Italy and Great Britain, Matteo Renzi and David Cameron respectively, described the Ebola epidemic as the most severe health emergency in the past years. Since the beginning of the year, Ebola has killed about 4,500 people out of the all 9,000 infected in seven countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States.
During his visit to Serbia on Thursday, President of Russia Vladimir Putin cautioned that the Europeans might be in for some serious disruptions in gas deliveries this winter in the absence of an agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Putin warned that if Ukraine siphoned gas from the pipelines carrying Russian gas to the West, Russia would trim its deliveries proportional to the quantity stolen from the pipelines. In June Russia cut off its gas deliveries to Ukraine, which was contesting the price hikes by Gazprom against the background of the crisis between Moscow and Kiev. A three-party conference on settling this dispute is due in Brussels on October 21st, under EU auspices. The EU’s reliance on Russian gas is 30%.
