April 15, 2024 UPDATE

A roundup of the main local and international news

Newsroom, 15.04.2024, 20:13

RIGHTS Authorities in Romania and neighbouring Ukraine are working together to ensure equal rights for the national minorities in the two states, Romania’s Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said at the end of the meeting he had in Bucharest on Monday with the president of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), Paul Grod. The Romanian minority in Ukraine and the Ukrainian minority in Romania are authentic bridges for a tighter cooperation between our peoples, Ciolacu wrote in a government post on social network X. The Union of the Ukrainians in Romania jointly with the Ukrainian World Congress staged the Summit of the UWC leaders in Bucharest over April 12-15.

RACE Simone Tempestini has become the first Romanian driver in history to have won the first leg in the European Rally Championship after a victory in Hungary’s Rally, the first leg of the 2024 season of the aforementioned competition. Romania’s national champion 8 times, Tempestini and his co-pilot, Sergiu Itu, secured, according to the press, an impeccable performance. He won two out of the 13 special events and stepped onto the podium in another six. He ended the nearly 190 kilometers race in 1 hour, 52 minutes and 50 seconds. Tempestini was born in Italy but has been living in Romania for 15 years now. He got the Romanian citizenship in 2016.

SENTENCE A court in Vaslui, eastern Romania on Monday ruled a home arrest sentence against the former PSD county leader Dumitru Buzatu on bribery counts. The indicted Buzatu was in a penitentiary until this time and now he is not allowed to leave the house without permission. He was arrested on September 23, in a sting operation staged by the anti-corruption prosecutors while he was receiving the equivalent of 250 thousand Euros to help a company get a contract. The money was found by the prosecutors in the trunk of his car. Considered by the press as one of the longest lasting local kingpins associated with the PSD, Buzatu, 68, was president of the Vaslui County Council since 2012 and an MP since 1992.

ATTACK “Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” António Guterres told the body’s Security Council as it met to discuss Saturday’s Iranian attack. “The Middle East is on the brink,” he warned. “The people of the region are confronting a real danger of a devastating full-scale conflict. Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate” insisted Antonio Guterres. The Iranian attack, called “Operation Honest Promise”, was a response to the strike that destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, an attack in which seven members of the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the Islamic Republic, lost their lives. Iran has put the blame on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Israel has been the avowed enemy of the Islamic Republic. So far, Tehran has not attacked Israel head-on, and the two countries have usually clashed through third parties, such as the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.

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