September 27, 2015 UPDATE

A roundup of domestic and international news ...

Newsroom, 27.09.2015, 12:15

On Sunday, the interim
president of the Social Democratic Party, the main partner in the ruling
coalition in Romania, announced he would run for party president at the party
congress on October 11th. The seat of president remained vacant
after Prime Minister Victor Ponta stepped down, as he was prosecuted for
corruption. However, he refused to leave the office of PM, so on Tuesday, the
liberal opposition will file a non-confidence motion, saying that the premier’s
legal problems are seriously affecting Romania’s credibility. In another
development, the appeal in the ‘Referendum’ case is to be tried by the Court of Cassation and Justice on
Monday. In this case, the main candidate for president of the Social Democratic
Party, Liviu Dragnea, got a suspended sentence of one year in prison. He was charged with rigging the referendum organized in 2012
on the impeachment of the then president, Traian Basescu.

International
peace and security, which are some of the UN’s major objectives, cannot be
fully promoted without focusing on development, said Romania’s president Klaus
Iohannis at the UN General Assembly on Sunday. He attended the UN summit which
adopted the document titled ‘Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development’. The Romanian head of state stressed that the causes
of the current conflicts must be addressed, such as poverty, the lack of any
hope, despair and social exclusion. He recalled the hundreds of thousands of
people who fled their war-ravaged countries in search for a better life in Europe, sometimes using methods that put their lives at risk. This
ever growing inflow of migrants from the Middle East and Africa has forced the European countries to make huge efforts to avoid a humanitarian disaster, the
Romanian president said. In his opinion, the phenomenon triggered a large-scale
crisis, both humanitarian and financial.
Unless adequate solutions are found to this crisis, each migration wave
will exceed the previous one, the Romanian president also said. Iohannis announced that Romania would revise
its National Strategy for Sustainable Development, which will be based on
supporting the inclusion of the disabled, of young people and women in
development policies. Klaus Iohannis, whose visit to the US ends on September
29th, will hold a meeting with the US vice-president Joe Biden, with
whom he will discuss the refugee crisis in Europe and the fight against
terrorism.

France has carried out air
strikes on Syria, on the basis of intelligence gathered during surveillance
missions over the past two weeks, the French Presidency announced on Sunday.
The operation was conducted in cooperation with the partners in the region and
confirms the determination to fight against the Islamic State terrorist
organization. In another move, in Baghdad, the Iraqi government has announced
it will boost its cooperation with Russia, Syria and Iran in the fight against
the Islamic State. The announcement comes at a time when Russia is
consolidating its military presence in Syria, by deploying fresh troops and
delivering arms and ammunition to Bashar al Assad’s regime.

On Monday and
Tuesday, Prince Radu will pay a formal visit to the Republic of Moldova, the former
Soviet state with a predominantly Romanian-speaking population, during which he
will also go to the town of Comrat, the administrative centre of the Autonomous
Region of Gagauzia. It’s for the first time that a member of the Romanian Royal
Family visits Gagauzia. Prince Radu will meet with the Moldovan Parliament
Speaker Andrian Candu and also with the Mayor of Chisinau, Dorin Chirtoaca. He
will receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the Moldovan Academy of
Science and will make a book donation to the university.

Romanian tennis player Monica
Niculescu, ranked 49th in the WTA classification, has qualified for
the second round of the Wuhan tournament in China, with over 2.2 million
dollars in prize money, after defeating the Chinese Jangzhou Liu. Niculescu’s
next opponent will be the Spanish Carla Suarez Navarro, number 10 in the WTA
rankings, who qualified straight to the second round. Another four Romanian
players will compete in the Wuhan tournament: first-seed Simona Halep, Irina
Begu, Alexandra Dulgheru and Patricia Tig. On Sunday, Irina Begu won the WTA
Seul tournament, after a match against Aliaksandra Sasnovich of
Belarus. Thanks to this victory, as of Monday, Irina Begu is ranked 26th
in the WTA classification.