9 September, 2017

Romania officially launches bid to host the European Medicines Agency after Brexit./ The Romanian-Dutch pair Horia Tecau and Jean-Julien Rojer win mens doubles title at the US Open.

Newsroom, 09.09.2017, 13:48

EU
agency relocation. Romania has officially launched its bid to host the European
Medicines Agency currently based in London and which will be relocated after
Brexit. The healthcare minister Florian Bodog says Romania has a 15-year
experience in the field and skilled labour in the form of 18,000 highly
qualified researchers. France, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary and Bulgaria also
offered to host the European Medicines Agency. The European Commission will
assess the bids by September 15 before announcing its final decision on the
sidelines of the General Affairs Council in November. The European Medicines
Agency is a decentralised agency of the European Union responsible for the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety monitoring of medicines in
the EU.

Hungary-Romania. Hungary has reiterated its decision not
to support Romania’s and Croatia’s accession to the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). The reasons given are a move by the
Romanian authorities to close the Roman-Catholic Theological College in Targu
Mures in Romania’s case and a dispute over an investment of the Hungarian
company MOL in Croatia in the latter case. The activity of the
Hungarian-language school in Targu Mures was suspended because the institution
no longer existed following a final court ruling. The foreign ministry in
Bucharest said any educational institution in Romania must respect, without
exception, the Romanian legislation, which does not discriminate on ethnic and
religious grounds. Any attempt to present the situation at the school in Targu
Mures as a failure to respect the rights of ethnic minorities is inaccurate,
the Romanian authorities also said, pointing out that there are many
educational institutions in Romania that demonstrate the Romanian state ensures
the right of the ethnic Hungarian minority to learn and be taught in its mother
tongue.

Commemoration. A massacre
committed on September 9th, 1940 by the troops of Horthyst Hungary
is commemorated today in the village of Treznea, in north-western Romania.
After the enforcement of the Vienna Award, by which Nazi Germany and fascist
Italy forced Romania to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary, the Hungarian
troops killed hundreds of ethnic Romanians. 86 people were killed Treznea and
157 in Ip. A similar massacre was committed on the 14th of October
1944 in Moisei, when 29 ethnic Romanians were killed.

Ethnic minorities. The Romanian authorities have again
called on Ukraine to re-examine its new education law that drastically
restricts education in the mother tongue for ethnic minorities. Romania’s
foreign minister Teodor Melescanu said after a telephone conversation with his
Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin that the situation can only be solved
during a meeting between the education ministers of the two states. Under the
legislative changes adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament, teaching in high
schools and universities is to be done only in the state language, while
teaching in the mother tongue of ethnic minorities will only be provided in
nurseries and primary schools. Almost half a million ethnic Romanians live in
the neighbouring Ukraine, mostly in the eastern Romanian territories annexed in
1940 after an ultimatum by the former Soviet Union and inherited by Ukraine as
a successor state in 1991.

US Open. The
Romanian-Dutch pair Horia
Tecau and Jean-Julien Rojer won the men’s doubles title at the US Open,
defeating the all-Spanish pair Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez in straight sets.
This is Tecau and Rojer’s second Grand Slam title after winning their first at
Wimbledon in 2015. Tecau also played the mixed doubles semifinals together with
the American player Coco Vandeweghe, but lost to the Swiss-British pair Martina Hingis and Jamie Murray.

Boxing. The Romanian boxer
Ronald Gavril was defeated by the American boxer David Benavidez by a split
decision in a match for the WBC super middleweight title held on Friday night
in Las Vegas. Gavril thus missed the chance to become Romania’s fifth world
champion in professional boxing after Mihai Leu, Leonard Doroftei, Lucian Bute
and Adrian Diaconu.

Festival. The George Enescu Festival has
entered its 8th day. The highlights today are the concerts given by
the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev and Camerata
Salzburg conducted by Tiberiu Soare. The concerts are broadcast by Radio
Romania’s music and culture channels.