August 2, 2015 UPDATE

A roundup of local and international news

Newsroom, 02.08.2015, 12:15

In Romania,
drought has affected large surface areas covered by farming land and damaged at
least a quarter of this year’s crops, the president of the League of
Agricultural Producers Associations, Laurentiu Baciu, told Radio Romania. He
said drought caused most damage to the corn production, as well as the
sunflower and soybean crops. Producers have help from the authorities, but for
the moment they were only promised aid for small-scale crops. In the case of
large crops, the agriculture ministry needs to come up with more comprehensive
funding schemes, which require the approval of the European Union.

Romania, together with Germany
and Bulgaria, proposed a revised Black Sea strategy that may constitute a first
step towards creating a European Union Black Sea strategy, said Romania’s
foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu. In an interview to Realitatea TV channel on
Saturday, he said Romania also proposed the creation of a new strategy to
approach NATO’s eastern and southern partners in the run up to the NATO summit
in Warsaw in 2016. Aurescu also said that Romania is not a target for Russia
because the former is a member of NATO and an attack on Romania is tantamount
to an attack against NATO.

The US Secretary of State John Kerry said after talks with his Egyptian
counterpart Sameh Choukri in Cairo on Sunday that if implemented, the nuclear
agreement with Iran would make the Middle East safer. After Egypt, Kerry
travels to Doha, where he is due to meet his counterparts from six Sunni
monarchies in the Gulf area worried about the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Kerry’s tour ends on August 8th and also takes him to South-East
Asia.

The situation of the Tartar population in the Crimean Peninsula, which
was annexed by Russia last year, was the main topic of the World Congress of
Tartars held in Ankara, Turkey. Around 500 delegations of Tartar organisations
from across the world, including Romania, attended the congress. They called on
the international community to step in and put an end to Russia’s undemocratic
actions against the ethnic Tartars in Crimea. The representatives of the
Democratic Union of Muslim Tartars in Romania reiterated their support for
finding a solution to the problems faced by the Tartars in Crimea. Most of
Romania’s 25,000 Tartars live in Dobruja, in the south-east, a province that
was under Ottoman rule for hundreds of years.

The European Commission supports
the resolution of the European Parliament on the recognition of the genocide
against the Roma during World War Two and the establishment of a Roma Holocaust
Memorial Day in Europe on the 2nd of August. Romania’s prime
minister Victor Ponta said his government welcomes the initiative of the Roma
civil society in Romania to commemorate together this tragic event in world
history and urged all Romanian citizens to observe a minute’s silence for the
victims. On the 2nd of August 1944, almost 3,000 Roma men, women and
children from the concentration camp in Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers
by the Nazis. The Roma are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe.

The Romanian tennis player Patricia Maria Tig,
no. 154 in the world, on Sunday lost the final of the tennis tournament in
Baku, Azerbaijan, worth 226,000 dollars. She was defeated by Russia’s Margarita
Gasparian, world no. 112, in three sets, 6-3, 5-7, 6-0. The qualification for
the final in Baku is the Romanian player’s best result yet. Tig and Gasparian
faced each other only once before in a match won by Gasparian in 2015 in
France.