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Day by day, the news about what is happening in America becomes more and more like the news from Russia. Some news tends to overlap so much that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is coming from the country led by Trump and what comes from Putin’s Russia. ICE troops appear to be related to OMON (a system of...

The decision rests on four precious seconds. In August 2024, the International Olympic Committee agreed that a protest over a score was made too late_ four seconds after the one-minute deadline_ and stripped American gymnast Simona Chiles of the bronze medal on floor exercise from the 2024 Paris Olympics and awarded it to Ana Barbosu of Romania. But almost 1 1/2...

Spain has made a  move to grant legal residency to up to half a million undocumented immigrants, taking a different approach than the one expressed in recent months by Western European countries hosting migrants.  Governments like that of Germany and the United Kingdom, increasingly seeing their resources drained by migrants, are taking measures other than curb arrivals and increase deportations.  Spain,...

Looking into the future, Estonia is insisting on an EU-wide entry ban on former Russian soldiers who participated in the war against Ukraine.  "There cannot be a path from Bucha to Brussels,"  Estonian’s Foreign Minister, Margus Tsahkna, has said in Brussels. He expressed his intention of raising the proposal at a meeting of EU foreign ministers later on January 29.  In...

Bucharest council has voted to scrap a proposal to hike public transport hikes, which the mayor said was necessary to save the capital’s public transport company from insolvency. The fare increases would have been the first on buses and trams in five years.   Bucharest mayor Ciprian Ciucu said he was disappointed and the vote (23 voted for and 28 voted...

US gymnast Jordan Chiles may be get back her Olympic bronze medal. Chiles lost out the medal to Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosu at the 2024 Paris Olympics sparking a dispute which Barbosu eventually won. But on Thursday, Switzerland’s supreme court said its judges had sent the “highly exceptional circumstances” of the bronze medal awarded in the women’s floor exercise back to the...

A government body tasked with investigating crimes committed by the communist regime on Thursday filed a criminal complaint over the death of 535 minors  between 1970 and 1997 at a home for disabled children. Data indicates that over half of the children hospitalized were 'exterminated' died at the facility in Moreni southern Romania, run by the Romanian state from malnutrition,...

Seventeen people died of influenza in the last week in Romania, taking the death toll this winter to 57, according to the National Institute of Public Health. There were 8,499 cases of clinical influenza registered nationwide in the last week, significantly more than the previous week when there were 6,287 cases and  1.6 times higher than the average of the...

The following speech was delivered on January 27th at the “Together we protect Romania’ Gala. I am honored by the award I received as the initiator and coordinator of the Economic@BNR project, but also for the actions to promote financial education, initiatives that come from the conviction that a correctly informed and financially well-educated society is a society capable of...

Since Russia’s invaded Ukraine in 2022, the European Union has adopted nineteen successive packages of sanctions aimed at weakening the Russian economy and, in particular, its energy revenues.  Coal imports were banned first, followed by crude oil and refined petroleum products. Natural gas flows were drastically reduced through sanctions and embargo.  However, one major sector has remained almost entirely untouched: the...