October 11, 2014
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România Internațional, 11.10.2014, 12:00
Romania wants the republic of Moldova, an ex-Soviet republic with a majority Romanian speaking population, to be a EU member state in 2019, when Romania will hold the EU presidency, said the Romanian PM in Chisinau. The Romanian official reviewed together with his Moldovan counterpart Iurie Leanca the 2 countries’ common projects in such fields as energy, culture, education and emergency interventions, and announced that Romania would continue to support Chisinau in developing infrastructure projects related to energy independence. According to the Romanian PM the Republic of Moldova should have 2 sources of natural gas, both in the west and east, to be able to choose when prices go up.
The Romanian foreign minister, Titus Corlatean, hails the decision of the Canadian authorities to include Romania on the list of designated countries of origin, which is an important step towards eliminating visas for the Romanians who travel to Canada. The list of designated countries of origin is an instrument set up by the Canadian authorities to prevent possible abuse of Canada’s immigration and asylum system, the countries included on this list being considered safe and democratic, countries that observe human rights and offer protection to refugees and asylum seekers.
The Diaspora representative in Romania’s parliament, Eugen Tomac, has called on Belgrade to respect the bilateral agreement between Romania and Serbia regarding the protection of national minorities. He pointed out that the Romanians in the Timoc Valley had to benefit from education, religious life and press in their mother tongue just as the Serbian community should enjoy the same rights in Romania. Eugen Tomac also added that it is unacceptable for the Serbian authorities to say one thing in Bucharest and Brussels and to act differently back home as regards the hundreds of thousand of Romanian ethnics in the Timoc Valley.
Romania’s national football team will meet Saturday on home turf the Hungarian eleven in a match counting towards the preliminaries of the 2016 European Championship to be held in France. The match scheduled on the National Arena stadium in Bucharest is fully booked. On Tuesday Romania will play an away match against Finland. Romania will play in Group F together with Northern Ireland, the Faeroe Islands and Greece. In their first group game, Romania defeated Greece 1-nil away. In the last 14 years, Romania has only once qualified for a final tournament, namely in 2008, for the European Championships hosted by Austria and Switzerland.
Thousands of people are likely to be massacred in the Syrian town of Kobani if it falls in the hands of the Islamic State Jihadists, the UN envoy for Syria, Steffan de Mistura, has warned. The jihadists are better armed than the Kurds who are defending the town of Kobani, and despite the air strikes by the US-led coalition, they could not be stopped. Turkish troops and tanks are positioned within striking distance of Kobani, but Ankara has so far refused to intervene and also stopped Syrian Kurds from crossing the border to help defend the town, despite pressure put by the Kurds and the US. In Iraq, the 2nd country partially controlled by the Islamic State, the jihadists publicly executed 13 people, including a journalist, and the government in Baghdad is trying to persuade the Sunni tribes to fight against the jihadists as they did in 2007 when they helped to defeat the Al Qaida organization in Iraq, which stems from the Islamic State. The Islamic State controls at present the greatest part of the Sunni area of Iraq, north and west of Baghdad, and the militants went as far as Abu Ghraib.
