October 31, 2014 UPDATE
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România Internațional, 31.10.2014, 12:05
Friday was the last day of the campaign in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential elections. A total of 14 candidates have enrolled in the race for Cotroceni. Over 18 million citizens are expected to hit the polls on Sunday, with the second ballot scheduled to take place on November 16, provided no candidate obtains half plus one of the total number of votes. Some 18,550 voting polls will be opened in the country and 294 abroad. The latest presidential elections were held on December 6, 2009. Under the Constitution, the president is elected over a period of 5 years.
In Romania, the unemployment rate for September was put at 7%, down 0.2% since the previous month, according to data made public on Friday by the National Statistics Institute. The number of the unemployed aged between 25 and 74 accounts for 75% of the total number of jobless people in September. The number of unemployed men is 1.6% higher than the number of unemployed women.
On November 1st the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation celebrates 86 years since the first broadcast was aired on the public radio. Radio Romania’s orchestras and choirs Friday held an anniversary concert under the baton of Tiberiu Soare and featuring pianist Horia Mihail. The concert opened with a Romanian piece — “Moldavian Landscapes”, written by Mihail Jora and continued with selections from the symphonic repertoire, pieces by Edvard Grieg and Ludwig van Beethoven. The Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation has three national and nine regional stations, including an international station broadcasting in ten foreign languages, in Romanian and Aromanian.
Berlin, Paris and Kiev called on Moscow not to recognise the elections to be held on Sunday by the pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. The self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk boycotted the legislative election held last Sunday in Ukraine and won by the pro-European forces, and announced they would hold their own elections on November the 2nd. Russia has already announced it would recognise the results of these elections. The announcement triggered criticism from Kiev and the West, which warned that Moscow’s support for the separatist election “undermines” the peace process designed to end the conflict in that former Soviet republic.