October 9, 2013 UPDATE

Romania’s Government postponed on Wednesday the endorsement of the new Traffic Code and asked for more technical details related to the opening of a single account for all the money cashed in from fines. The Traffic Code bill was first discussed in a Government meeting last week. The new code brings about major changes in case of road accidents and drunk driving. Any drivers involved in accidents which resulted in fatalities will have their license suspended throughout the duration of the trial. Driving with a blood alcohol concentration above the 0.5% threshold, will be considered a crime, while any concentration between 0.2 and 0.5% will be considered an offence. Fines have also been increased under the new code and may go as high as 2150 euros. Serious road accidents may also end in the suspension of the driver’s license for two years. Prime Minister Victor Ponta says the main purpose of the code is to ensure road traffic safety. According to statistics, Romania ranks 3rd at EU level in terms of road traffic fatalities, with 11 victims per 1 hundred thousand people.

The Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta on Wednesday announced that state funerals will be staged for the victims of the tragic accident off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Over 300 people drowned last week after a boat packed with African migrants caught fire and sank. The Italian PM alongside the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malstrom who paid a visit to the Island, were booed by the locals. African migrants often head for Lampedusa Island in dangerously overcrowded boats. Statistics show that over the past 20 years, between 17 and 20 thousand migrants have found their death in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe.

The Holocaust victims were commemorated on Wednesday in Romania. This particular date was set by the authorities because on October 9, 1941, the deportation of the Jews from Bassrebia and Bukovina to Transniester started. In a message posted on the presidential administration’s website, the head of state, Traian Basescu, says that the day dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust victims in Romania is, for the Romanian people, a duty of honour and an appeal to responsibility towards the historical truth. In his turn, Prime Minister Victor Ponta expressed his compassion for all the Jews that suffered under the the regime of terror during the WW2.

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to researchers Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt şi Arieh Warshel for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced. The work of Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is ground-breaking in that they managed to make Newton’s classical physics work side-by-side with the fundamentally different quantum physics.