April 12, 2015
A roundup of local and international news
Newsroom, 12.04.2015, 12:00
Orthodox, Greek-Catholic and neo-Protestant believers celebrate Easter, including in Romania, a majority Orthodox country. On Saturday night, people went to church to attend the Easter Vigil. A few minutes before midnight, the priest appears at the altar holding a lit candle. Everybody lights their candles and say Christ has risen. People return home keeping their candles burning. At the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest, the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, patriarch Daniel, urged believers to pray for the Christians who suffer for their faith.
US president Barack Obama said his one-on-one talks with the Cuban leader Raul Castro represent a turning point for in the relationship between the two states, describing the talks as sincere and productive. Held at the Summit of the Americas, this was the first official meeting of US and Cuban leaders in the last 50 years. The US and Cuba decided to normalise ties in December, after decades of Cold War inherited tension. US and Cuba broke off diplomatic relations in 1961, while in 1982, Cuba was on a US State Department list of countries harbouring terrorism, being accused of providing assistance to Marxist insurgency.
During a Vatican church service, Pope Francis used the word “genocide” to describe the massacre against Armenians under Ottoman rule 100 years ago, a statement which risks souring relations with Turkey, writes France Presse news agency. “In the past century our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies”, said the Pope during a mass at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. “The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the 20th century’, struck your own Armenian people”, the pontiff said, citing a 2000 statement signed by the late pontiff John Paul II and the Armenian patriarch. Francis said that the other two tragedies were the Nazi Holocaust and Stalinism. According to Armenia, 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1917, as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart. Turkey says the killings were part of a civil war that resulted in the death of 300,000-500,000 Armenians and just as many Turks.
World Aviation and Astronautics Day is celebrated on the 12th of April to commemorate the first manned space flight. In 1961, the spacecraft Vostok 1 was launched into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, today in Kazakhstan. It was a very dangerous mission, as almost half of the previous flights as part of the Sputnik space programme, carrying dogs into the orbit, had been unsuccessful. The 27-year-old Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to journey into the outer space. His flight lasted 108 minutes at an altitude varying between 175 and 380 km. He also made the first televised broadcast from space.
Greece was given until the 20th of April to present a list of acceptable reforms to secure the second payment of 2.7 billion euros of its international aid package, France Presse cites the German newspaper Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung, which quotes Eurogroup sources. The 20th of April was chosen as the only possible date by which Greece’s credits can examine the reform proposals before a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on the 24th of April in Riga.
