September 25, 2022 UPDATE

Click here for a roundup of domestic and international news

Newsroom, 25.09.2022, 19:35

GRAIN 211 ships carrying 4.7 million tons of agricultural products have
so far left Ukraine under an agreement brokered by the United Nations and
Turkey to unblock Ukrainian sea ports, the ministry of infrastructure in
Ukraine has announced. The agreement signed on July 22nd in Istanbul
provides for setting up safe corridors for the transport of Ukrainian grain.
Ukraine’s grain exports slumped after the Russian invasion in late February and
the blockade on the country’s Black Sea ports, driving up global food prices
and prompting fears of shortages in Africa and the Middle East. Ukraine, a
major grain producer and exporter, used to have monthly grain shipments up to 6
million tons before the war. After the Russian invasion, Ukraine had to shift
to the road and river transport infrastructures to ship its grain to Eastern
Europe, but the quantities exported have been significantly lower due to some
logistic shortcomings.

MEDALS Romanian rowers walked away with four gold medals from the World
Championships in Racice, the Czech Republic. The winners are the lightweight
single women’s scull, the men’s double scull, the women’s double scull and the
women’s eight. The Romanian delegation participated with 11 boats and managed
to qualify in nine finals. In the medals’ standings Britain ranks first
followed by Italy and Romania. At the previous edition of the aforementioned
competition in Ottensheim, Austria, the Romanian men’s four and women’s double
sculls obtained two silver medals.

VISIT Over September 26-28, Romania’s Prime Minister, Nicolae
Ciuca is paying a visit to Tokyo to participate in the state funeral staged in
the honor of the country’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. According to a
government communiqué, the former Japanese Prime Minister made a significant
contribution to lifting the bilateral relations between the two countries to
the degree of a strategic partnership during the visit he paid to Bucharest in
2018, being the first Japanese Prime Minister to have visited Romania. Japan
is one of Romania’s main partners in Asia both at political and economic level
and there are all the prerequisites to transform this bilateral relation spanning
more than one century into a privileged relation at the level of strategic
partnership, Prime Minister Ciuca has said. On the sidelines of his visit to
Tokyo, the Romanian official will be received by his Japanese counterpart Fumio
Kishida and will be having talks with the delegation of the Japan-Romania
Parliamentary Friendship League chaired by Ichiro Aisawa and with Hosoda
Hiroyuki, Speaker of the House of Representatives of Japan.

REFUGEES Roughly 10,400 Ukrainian nationals entered Romania on Saturday,
6.3% more than in the previous day, the Romanian border police have announced.
Since February 10th, over 2.4 million Ukrainians have entered
Romania most of them transiting it. In the past 24 hours, the Romanian
authorities have issued 77 residence permits for the Ukrainian citizens. According to the
Interior Ministry in Bucharest, 70 thousand such permits have been issued since
March 18th. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, roughly
44 hundred Ukrainians have applied for asylum in Romania.

IT Romania has this week become European champion in the
2022 Junior Informatics Olympiad. According to the Society for Excellence and
Performance in Computing, students from Romania won two gold, four silver and
one bronze medal at the aforementioned competition staged online by Ukraine,
which brought together 170 competitors from 132 countries. The winners are
students from the cities of Bucharest and Ploiesti in southern Romania and
according to the teachers training them Romania is the only country that has
managed to win gold in every edition of the aforementioned competition.

(bill)