May 8, 2023

LONDON Thousands of street parties are going to take place today in Britain to mark the coronation of King Charles lll. The country's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was among those hosting a coronation lunch with the guests including Ukrainian families, youth groups and US first lady Jill Biden. Churches and local communities are going to stage events devoted to this occasion in public gardens and parks. A special concert to be held at Windsor Castle will bring together artists like Lionel Richie, Katy Perry or the band Take That. Thousands of public buildings will see lasers and light projections to celebrate the coronation tonight. King Charles and Queen Camilla have conveyed a message of gratitude for the support shown by the Britons during the coronation procedures.

ORDINANCE An emergency ordinance on curbing public spending is to be endorsed by the government in Bucharest this week after being assessed by the ruling coalition, Romania's Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca has announced. Finance Minister Adrian Câciu is expected to present today the coalition leaders with the concrete measures on cutting budget expenses, which also include hiring freeze in state institutions after May 15th. In another development, the head of the Executive says that no increased taxes will be levied on private sector employees. And the same public message was delivered by the leader of the co-ruling PSD, Marcel Ciolacu who added that he doesn't give up on the measure of cutting special pensions. The law will be subjected to public debates and be approved by the Executive later on.

CYBERSECURITY As of this week Bucharest will be hosting the headquarters of a major EU agency, the European Centre for Cyber Security, which is to protect the economy and population from cyber attacks, support research in this field and help European enterprises to develop their cyber-security capabilities. The aforementioned agency will be cooperating with a network of national centers in the EU countries. Romania's Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca and Roberto Viola, Director-General of the European Commission's Department for Communications Networks, will be attending the inauguration event. In December 2020, EU representatives chose Romania to host the aforementioned center among the other applicants like Belgium, Germany, Spain, Luxembourg, Poland and Lithuania. Bucharest's trump cards included the high-speed Internet it uses, the centre's exemption from various taxes and duties and the fact that this city hadn't hosted any European agency until that time.

SUBSIDIES Romania's Agriculture Minister Petre Daea says that the greengrocers who are still using toxic substances will have their subsidies cut. The statement came upon an investigation which proved that many farmers put on sale vegetables, which had been sprinkled with toxic substances with a concentration up to 8 times higher than the limit approved. The minister says the authorities will be monitoring the farmers benefitting from support through national programmes for the greenhouse cultivation of vegetables so that no more non-compliant vegetables may reach the market. The police have conducted many searches in the counties of Buzau and Ilfov, in southern Romania, where they found hundreds of containers with chemical substances from Turkey whose concentrations proved to be higher than those admitted by the EU legislation. The greengrocers used these substances to ripen vegetables faster and sell them on the market for higher prices. According to police sources, in some cases these toxic vegetables were sold as organic products.

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