January 12, 2015

Click here for a roundup of domestic and international news

Ştefan Stoica, 12.01.2015, 12:00

Romanian tennis player, WTA 3rd-seed Simona Halep will be taking part in the Premier 700 category tournament, hosted by the Australian city of Sydney. Halep is the main favorite to winning the competition and on Tuesday will be taking on Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic. The confrontation counts towards the competition’ s eighth finals. Halep this past Saturday won the WTA tournament in China’s Shenzhen, securing a straight-sets win in the final against her Swiss challenger Timea Bacsinsky. Halep has thus added to her record the ninth WTA title of her career, also being rewarded with 280 WTA points and 111,163 dollars. Right after the Sydney event, the year’s first Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open is scheduled to start on January 19. We recall in 2014 Halep had to leave the Australian Open as early as the quarterfinals.

German Justice Minister has called on the anti-Islamist movement PEGIDA (European Patriots Against the Islamisation of the West) to cancel the rally they scheduled this afternoon in the western city of Dresden. The Minister has been accusing the organization of trying to unjustifiably whip up hatred sparked by the Paris attacks. The movement has stated the attacks in Paris were proof of the fact that Islamists were incompatible with democracy and urged everybody to wear mourning signs in the memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks. For a couple of months now, PEGIDA has every so often been staging protest rallies, mainly targeting German organizations promoting tolerance and inter-ethnic dialogue. Germany’s Muslim community, mainly made of Turkish migrants, has voiced its growing concern over such reactions, given that a recent survey has revealed nearly 60 per cent of Germans viewed Islam as a threat.

The movie Boyhood won the Best Drama Award at the 72nd edition of the Golden Globes on Sunday in Los Angeles. The film was made over 12 years, following the evolution of a boy from the age of six to his coming of age. The Grand Budapest Hotel by director Wes Anderson got the award for best comedy, while the Russian film Leviathan won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Movie. Julianne Moore got the Best Leading Actress award for her performance in Still Alice, while Eddie Redmayne got the Globe for Best Leading Actor for The Theory of Everything. Michael Keaton won Best Leading Actor in a Comedy award, while Amy Adams won the female equivalent for her performance in Big Eyes. George Clooney got a lifetime achievement award. The Golden Globes, as the first big awards of the season, are considered the best predictors for the Oscars.

Austrian authorities have seized two adolescents aged 16 and 17, respectively, as they were trying to reach Syria via Romania, in order to marry the Jihadi group Islamic State fighters, a spokesperson of the Austrian Prosecutor’s Office stated on Sunday, Reuters informs. The girls were sent back to Austria from Romania, where the authorities found them on a train. The families of the two girls are of Bosnian and Chechen origin. According to the Austrian Interior Ministry, around 170 people, most of whom were coming from Eastern Europe, have reached Middle East via Austria, in a bid to join Islamist militant groups.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko joined French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkel in a meeting Sunday in Paris to examine the conditions that have to be met in solving the crisis in south eastern Ukraine and the schedule of preparations ahead of the 15 January meeting in Astana in the so-called Normandy group (Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany). The first meeting of this kind was in June 2014, around D-Day celebrations, and the second in October at a summit in Milan. The four leaders hold periodic telephone conferences for finding a solution to the secession conflict in Ukraine, which has left at least 4,700 dead since April.

President Klaus Johannis in Bucharest today is holding talks with parties and political groups with parliamentary representation, focusing on the financing of the defense sector. According to the presidential administration, high on the talks’ agenda is the signing of a political agreement, whereby a threshold of at least 2 per cent of the GDP will be provided for defense, by 2017. Johannis has called on all political groups, the governing as well as the opposition ones, to stick to fulfilling the aforementioned objective for at least 10 years, in the hope that military spending will thus be predictable, mainly with respect to training and strategic endowment programmes. Prime Minister Victor Ponta last week stated the idea of proper financing for the defense put forward by President Klaus Johannis was a fair one, and responsibility for such an idea would have to be assumed based on a multi-party agreement. The main political parties have in turn voiced their support for the idea.

French security forces have continued their search operations, in a bid to find one or more accomplices of last week’s attacks in Paris, perpetrated by Jihadi militants, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has stated today, according to the AFP. Valls has also announced the maximum level for the antiterrorist alert would be kept in place, while a great number of military and riot police is to be deployed, to protect synagogues, Hebrews schools and mosques. Yesterday, more than 3.7 million people in France gathered in an anti-terrorist rally, which is the largest such protest movement in the country’s history. More than 50 presidents and Prime Ministers in Paris, Romanian president Klaus Johannis included, joined French president Francois Hollande in a rally counting nearly two million people. We recall 17 people were killed in Paris last week. The death toll included journalists working for the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, policemen, as well as civilians taken hostage in a supermarket. The anti-terrorist operation ended in the killing of the three Jihadists who were involved in the attack.