September 17, 2018

Click here for a roundup of domestic and international news

Newsroom, 17.09.2018, 13:29

RULING Romania’s Constitutional Court has today ruled over a draft on
reviewing the country’s Constitution, which stipulates the family is based on
the freely consented marriage between a man and a woman, not between spouses as
it is at present. The draft, endorsed by the Senate last week, must be
validated through a referendum, which is due on October 7th. With
the exception of the opposing USR (Save Romania Union) all Parliamentarian
parties have endorsed the draft, which is based on a citizens’ initiative,
which gathered over 3 million signatures from all over the country. According
to ACCEPT, an organization that campaigns for sexual minority rights, the vote
in the Senate infringes upon the right to private and family life, which
belongs to all people irrespective of gender and sexual orientation.

RABLA A programme aimed at renewing Romania’s car fleet called RABLA has resumed in Romania today.
According to environment Minister Gratiela Gavrilescu 30 thousand scrapping
incentives have been made available after the government has approved another
43 million Euros for environmental preservation. So, any Romanian who may want
to buy a car can benefit from a bonus of 14 hundred Euros and another 366 Euros
for the purchase of a hybrid car. Legal persons can also benefit the Rabla programme.

CLEANUP Roughly 340 thousand volunteers have participated in the 6th
edition of the National Cleanup Day staged by ‘Let’s Do It, Romania!’
foundation on September 15th. Let’s Do It, Romania! is the largest
social movement in Romania and the event on Saturday was part of the World
Cleanup Day, carried under the aegis of Let’s Do it, World and the United
Nations Environment Programme. 13 million volunteers from 155 countries have
joined the international cleanup action. The objective of the World Cleanup Day is
to mobilize 5% of the world population in order to change people’s attitude
towards the proper waste management and disposal and could be considered the
most ambitious civic initiative at world level ever.

SUMMIT Today and tomorrow, Bucharest is seeing the third Summit
of the Three Seas Initiative, an informal political platform at presidential
level, which brings togehter the 12 EU members between the Baltic Sea, the
Adriatic and the Black Sea – Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The initiative’s main objective is development on three main directions:
transportation, energy and digital. The first edition of the Initiative’s
Business Forum is to take place on the sidelines of the event, which is
attended for the first time by the European Commission president Jean Claude
Juncker. The initiative’s first two editions took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia
in 2016 and Warsaw, Poland in 2017.

TENNIS The Romanian Simona Halep continues
to have a laid-back lead in the WTA professional tennis rankings made public on
Monday. Now in her 46th week as a world standings leader and 11th-placed
according to an all-time a classification, Halep is more than 2,000 points
clear of runner-up Danish Caroline Wozniacki, and more than 2,500 points clear
of third-placed tennis player, German Angelique Kerber. Of the Top 100 WTA
Romanian tennis players, only Irina Begu went two notches down, from the 53rd
to the 55th position, while the other Romanian tennis players have
retained their WTA places; Mihaela Buzarnescu is still 23rd-placed and
Sorana Carstea is 50th-ranked, while Ana Bogdan is ranked the 80th
and Monica Niculescu is on the 81st position. The rankings remain
unchanged for the 2018 WTA Finals as well, with Simona Halep at the top of the
table, followed in descending order by Angelique Kerber, who is almost 1,800
points down from Halep. Both tennis players have qualified for the Singapore
competition while third-placed is the Czech Petra Kvitova.

(translated by bill)