October 7, 2021 UPDATE

A roundup of local and international news.

Newsroom, 07.10.2021, 19:50

COVID-19. Romania recorded on Thursday almost
14,500 new Covid cases from 66,000 tests and 263 deaths. More than 15,000 people
are in intensive care, including 22 children. No ICU beds are available for
Covid patients, with the exception of those who also have other medical
conditions. In another move, the government extended the state of alert for a
further 30 days from 10th October. Face masks are now mandatory outdoors
in areas where the incidence rate passes 6 per thousand inhabitants.

Politics. Romanian president Klaus Iohannis said on Thursday that
he will invite all parliamentary parties and groups for a first round of talks
on Monday at noon to solve the government crisis. This comes after Florin Cîțu’s cabinet formed by the National Liberal Party and the Democratic
Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania fell on Tuesday after a vote of
no-confidence initiated by the Social Democrats in opposition. The motion also
got the votes of the nationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians and the
Save Romania Union, itself in the government coalition until a month ago.

Nuclear.
Nuclearelectrica, the company operating the nuclear power plant in Cernavodă,
in south-eastern Romania, so far supplied over 200 million MWh (megawatt-hour) to the national energy grid, according
to a statement from the company. 25 years after the first nuclear reaction went
into operation, the plant provides around 20% of consumption, accuonting for
33% of Romania’s green energy production. In 25 years, it prevented over 170
million tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. Nuclear energy
provides jobs to 11,000 people in Romania and has a total turnover of around
600 million euros. The Cernavodă plant has two reactors, each with an
installed capacity of 700 MW. Both use the CANDU 6 technology developed in
Canada which uses natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as a cooling agent.
Energy minister Virgil Popescu said Romania is planning to build new nuclear
facilities in Cernavodă together with American, Canadian and French partners.

Nobel. Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the
2021 Nobel literature prize. The Swedish Academy praised his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the
effects of colonialism and the fate of
the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents. Gurnah was born in
1948 on Zanzibar island in the Indian Ocean and arrived in the UK as a refugee
at the end of the 1960s. He began writing in English and published 10 novels
and a series of short stories. The Nobel winners in physics, medicine and
chemistry were also announced this week, with the peace prize to be announced
on Friday and that for economics on 11th October. (CM)