Romania

Over 60,000 people in Romania petitioned for the abolition of immersing babies in baptism ceremonies, as the Ortodox Church blames the parents and stands by its practices following a baby’s death.

“Immersion has been practiced for two millennia and will continue for the next 1,000 years”, said the archbishop of Tomis to a nationalist TV broadcaster.

Outage in Romania led to underfrequency in Europe. According to Austrian Power Grid, normal operation was restored after one hour.

According to Austrian Power Grid (APG), a disturbance occurred in the synchronized European high-voltage power grid Friday afternoon, which led to an under frequency in Europe with a short-term frequency deviation of about 260 mHz. The detailed analysis is still in progress.

Thanks to the protection mechanisms established throughout Europe and the immediate and coordinated cooperation of the transmission system operators, normal operation for the whole of Europe was restored within an hour. APG controls the supra-regional power transmission grid in Austria.

More than 40 countries have imposed a ban on UK arrivals, include Belgium, Canada, India, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Russia, and Switzerland. On Monday, European Union member states meet to discuss a co-ordinated response and France is planning to establish a protocol "to ensure movement from the UK can resume.

A record of 2.958 new COVID-19 cases has been registered in the past 24 hours in Romania with the total case number reaching 142.570. This record was followed by a new record of Covid-19 related deaths counting 82. One of the people that died was an 18-year-old who supposedly suffered from underlying conditions.

Reuters reports that the Saturday KLM flight from Bucharest to Amsterdam (KL1376) was evacuated before just before the departure on after a bomb threat was received, which later appeared to have been a false alarm.

KLM informed that passengers and crew have been taken off-board of the Boeing 737 and are safe, the flight will departure now on Sunday

Romania's president, Klaus Iohannis, has mocked the minority Hungarian community and the Social-Democratic Party by accusing them of "giving away in secret" a piece of the state's territory to Hungary.

The president had been nominated for the Charlemagne prize last autumn on the grounds of defending multiculturality, diversity, unity, and democracy, core values of the European Union, values that this statement of his contradicts according to political commentators. They speculate that it was probably just a political maneuver to rally the country's right-wing voters to his party for the upcoming municipal elections and that it shows the biggest flaw of Eastern European EU member states: sacrificing democratic values to strengthen the state, a leftover tradition from the Cold War.