November 7, 2016
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Newsroom, 07.11.2016, 12:00
NATO – NATO’s Deputy Secretary General, Rose Gottemoeller, is meeting today in Bucharest with the Romanian President, Klaus Iohannis, the Foreign Minister Lazăr Comănescu and the Defense Minister Mihnea Motoc. On Tuesday she will meet with high-ranking officials from 9 allied states from Central and Eastern Europe, namely Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, who will be participating in a regional meeting. Mrs. Gottemoeller is the first woman to hold the position of NATO’s Deputy Secretary General. Previously she held the office of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security for the U.S. State Department.
CAR CRASH – 24 people wounded in Saturday’s pileup on the fog-bound highway linking Bucharest to Constanta (in the southeast) are still in hospital. One of the injured is in a critical condition. Investigators are trying to establish who caused the multi-vehicle accident that killed 4 people. Prosecutors have opened a criminal case file for manslaughter and bodily injury and started the technical verification of the 29 cars involved in the multi-car crash. Several drivers had their licenses suspended for careless driving and failure to maintain safe distance between cars, since fog was very dense on the highway.
HANDBALL – Romania’s men’s handball team on Sunday defeated the Polish team 28-23 in Cluj-Napoca (northwest). This is one of the team’s most resounding victories of the past years against Poland, bronze medalist at last year’s World Handball Championship. The match counted for Group 2 of the preliminaries of the 2018 European Men’s Handball Championship. Trained by Xavier Pascual, who also trains the famous FC Barcelona, the Romanian handballers also won the away match against Belarus last week. Romania is the group leader with 4 points, being followed by Belarus with 2 points, Serbia 2 points and Poland 0 points. The next match of the Romanian men’s handball team will be against Serbia on home ground. The match is scheduled for May 2017. Romania has not managed to qualify to the final of a European Championship since 1996, the latest final tournament in which they participated being that of the 2011 World Champion.
BULGARIA – In Bulgaria, the candidate of the Socialist opposition, Major General of the Reserve, Rumen Radev, and that of the GERB center-right party, Ţeţka Ţaceva, have obtained most of the votes in Sunday’s presidential election. They will face each other in a second round of voting scheduled for November 13. The former Commander of the Bulgarian Air Force is ranked 1st, at a small distance from his challenger Ţeţka Ţaceva who is supported by the current power in Sofia and who obtained 22.5% of the votes. The Bulgarian PM Boiko Borisov said his party obtained best results, this landslide victory being due to their coalition with other parties. He announced he would resign if General Radev won the presidential election.
AMERICAN ELECTION – On Tuesday Americans will vote for their president choosing between the Democrat Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president Bill Clinton, and the Republican billionaire Donald Trump. Polls show a 3-4% advantage for the Democrat candidate, a percentage which is within the limits of the error of margin, though. If Hillary Clinton wins the election she will carry on the projects started by Barack Obama, namely involvement in the international coalition against terrorism and strengthening of NATO’s eastern flank in order to discourage Russia. Analysts say Donald Trump’s victory would critically change the situation, in the sense that the US will be more open towards Moscow and will no longer receive refugees from Syria. (translation by L.Simion)
