September 25, 2015

Click here for a roundup of domestic and international news

România Internațional, 25.09.2015, 12:00

Romanian president Klaus Iohannis is
today attending the opening of the UN summit in New York during which a
post-2015 development agenda will be adopted. Also on president Iohannis’
agenda there is a meeting with Mogens Lykketoft, President of the UN General Assembly.
During a meeting with US investors yesterday, president Iohannis invited them
to invest in Romania, saying that Romania at present has a stable and
predictable economy. The agenda of president Iohannis’ visit in the USA due to
end on September 29th, also includes a meeting with US Vice
President Joe Biden, with whom he will be talking about the refugee crisis
Europe is facing and the fight against terror.

The European Commission has called on all the 28
community states to launch investigations in order to find out how many Volkswagen vehicles have been fitted with systems violating
the EU norms, while rating agencies said they could downgrade the German
carmaker. Volkswagen has been accused of cheating emission tests in the USA. According to an environmental protection agency, some cars being sold in
America had devices in diesel engines that could detect when they were being
tested, changing the performance accordingly to improve results. Romania hasn’t
so far received any requests on additional tests for VW vehicles, Cristian
Bucur, the technical manager of the Romanian Car Registry Authority said.

The United States
Trade and Development Agency USTDA will grant Romanian company Transgaz a
non-reimbursable loan of 956 thousand dollars for a project on enlarging the
gas pipeline network. The financing agreement has been signed in Bucharest by
the US ambassador to Romania, Hans Klemm and the general manager of Transgaz,
Petru Ioan Vaduva. The money will be used for conducting a feasability study on
building the Romanian section of the Bulgaria-Romania-Hungary-Austria pipeline
and for another pipeline in southeastern Romania.

Pope Francis’s agenda for his first visit to
the US has no less than five events on schedule, all of them in New York: a
speech at the UN headquarters, an ecumenical celebration at the September 11
Museum, a visit to a school in Harlem, a procession in the Central Park and an
evening liturgy at the huge Madison Square Garden with around 20 thousand
people attending. In a historic address yesterday, the first one to have been
given by the Pontiff before US Congress, Pope Francis made an appeal to
vigilance against any type of fundamentalism, be it religious or otherwise.
The Pontiff made an appeal to US Congress, which is divided as regards
migration policy, to reject the hostile mentality on migrants, and went on to
say that the US should not repeat the sins and mistakes of the past regarding
migrants.

Luxembourg will be playing host for a conference on the refugee crisis,
with emphasis on their route through the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean to
Europe, which is due to be held on October the 8th, the Luxembourg
presidency of the EU has announced. The event will be attended by foreign and
interior ministers from member countries, from Turkey and from the Balkans.
France Press recalls that the Balkan countries are daily crossed by thousands
of Syrian and Iraqi refugees who are taking the so-called Balkans route towards
Western and Northern Europe, seeking asylum mainly in Germany and Sweden.
Germany estimates it will be seeing between 800 thousand and one million
asylum-seekers this year, a record high for this country and Europe. In order
to handle the crisis sparked off by the mass inflow of refugees, the European leaders
insisted on setting up centers of selecting and registering migrants, the
so-called hotspots, in Italy and Greece, the first countries where the refugees
arrive, and possibly in Turkey and Bulgaria. The authorities in Athens
announced the first three centers would become operational in late October,
France Press has announced.

Romania could adopt
the European single currency in 2022 or 2023, technically speaking, yet the
decision to be made regarding the moment of adoption will be a political one, the
vice-governor of Romania’s Central Bank Bogdan Olteanu has said. Olteanu went
on to say that Romania was one of the few countries from outside the euro zone
with an optimistic outlook on the adoption of the Euro. Previously, the Central
Bank and the Government announced that 2019 was the deadline year set for the
adoption of the European single currency.