Covid-19Ro. <\/strong>Romania registered on Thursday over 32 thousand new Covid
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Troops. <\/strong>The
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Foreign affairs. <\/strong>France wants the expansion of
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Corruption. <\/strong>Radu
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Tourism.<\/strong>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A roundup of local and international news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":105208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[28950,35374,13794,29229,28905],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-105672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsflash","tag-corruption","tag-covid-19","tag-nato","tag-tourism","tag-ukraine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\ncases out of over 100,000 tests and 111 related deaths. Almost 1,000 Covid
\npatients are in intensive care. The incidence rate in Bucharest passed 24 cases
\nper one thousand inhabitants – the highest since the beginning of the pandemic.
\nWe recall that, on Tuesday, Romania exceeded the threshold of 40,000 new
\ninfections in 24 hours, out of 122 thousand tests performed. It is the absolute
\nrecord since the beginning of the pandemic and more than double the peak of the
\nprevious wave. The government extended the state of alert by a further 30 days
\nfrom Monday, 7 February.<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
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\nUnited States has announced that it will send nearly 3,000 additional troops to
\nRomania, Poland and Germany to protect Eastern Europe from a potential
\nescalation of the crisis triggered by the massing of Russian troops near
\nUkraine. One thousand of them will come to Romania. The Pentagon has said these
\nwill be temporary missions, aimed to strengthen the European allies’ defence
\nagainst the background of the tensions with Russia. Moscow has denied
\nplans to invade Ukraine, but has said it is not willing to compromise and warns
\nthat it might take unspecified military action if its demands are not met. Such
\ndemands include NATO’s promise that Ukraine will never become a member of the
\nalliance. <\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
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\nthe Schengen area during its current presidency of the EU Council, said the
\nFrench foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian after a
\nmeeting of the Bucharest Nine Format. He said Paris may deploy several hundred
\nmilitary to Romania as part of its defence and deterrence policy on NATO’s
\neastern flank. The Romanian foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu hosted a round of
\ntalks of the states in the Bucharest Nine Format to discuss the security
\nsituation in the Ukraine and Black Sea neighbourhood. He said the current
\ncrisis is about the overall security of the Euro-Atlantic space, saying allied
\nstates must continue to coordinate with each other to find concrete measures to
\ndeescalate the situation. The meeting was also attended by the Ukrainian
\nforeign minister Dmytro Kuleba. Talks
\nlooked at the latest developments in the eastern neighbourhood and the Black
\nSea region with an impact on overall Euro-Atlantic security. Also on Thursday,
\npresident Klaus Iohannis received the French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
\nHe emphasised the importance placed by Romania on its strategic partnership
\nwith France, a relationship based on longstanding historical ties and cultural
\naffinities, dynamic cooperation in many areas and common interests and
\nobjectives. <\/p>\n
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\nMaz\u0103re, the former mayor of the Black Sea port of Constan\u0163a recived a final
\nsentence from the High Court of Cassation and Justice to five years in prison
\nfor bribery and influence peddling in the so-called Polaris case. Initially, in
\nMarch 2019, Maz\u0103re received a sentence in the court of first instance of 9
\nyears and 10 months in prison, a sentence reduced on appeal by the Supreme
\nCourt to 5 years, after the judges acquitted the former mayor for some of the
\noffences. In the same case, businessman Sorin Gabriel Strutinsky was sentenced
\nto 5 years in prison for accessory to bribe taking. The former Social Democrat
\nMP Eduard Stelian Martin, the owner of Polaris, was also acquitted. He had
\npreviously received a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n
\n
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\nTourist arrivals rose by more than 46% in 2021 compared with the previous year
\nto reach 9.2 million, with Romanian tourists accounting for some 91% and
\nforeign tourists for 9%, according to the National Institute for Statistics.
\nEuropean tourists accounted for some 74% of the total of foreign tourists, with
\nalmost 77% of them from the EU. The average stay in tourist facilities was 2.2
\ndays for both Romanian and foreign tourists. (CM)<\/p>\n