On the morning of November 25, a Russian drone crashed onto the grounds of a farm in the village of Puiesti, 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Romania's border with Moldova. The horrified owner of the farm told local media that he was at home with his family when he heard a very loud bang. A drone had crashed into a tree. Many villagers later gave graphic accounts to the Romanian media, with some saying they feared a war.
It's a zero to hero story," said Gemma Webb, CEO of RetuRO, the company running the system in a public-private partnership with beverage packaging manufacturers and the state.
German and Romanian fighter jets scrambled on November 25 to track the latest in a series of drone incursions into Romania's airspace as Russia continues to attack targets just across the Danube River in neighboring Ukraine. Two drones entered the NATO-member's airspace and six were reported in Moldova, where one fell on the roof of a building but did not explode. This follows an incident last week when a Russian drone hit a Turkish LPG tanker moored on the Ukrainian side of the river.
The country ranked fifth on the measles outbreak list last year, reporting 30,692 cases and 23 deaths. According to Dr. Aurora Stanescu, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Public Health in Romania, five of those deaths were children under age 1. Schwalbe calls those figures a "wake-up call." "That's a lot of cases of measles, and that's a lot of deaths from a disease that really shouldn't be killing anybody at this point," Schwalbe says.
The journalist Kenneth P. Vogel is an investigative reporter, which means he often writes about people who would rather he did not. Vogel works for The New York Times, and his book called "Devils' Advocates" covers Americans who take money from foreigners to advise them about the U.S. government. Did you receive anything you would regard as a threatening letter or phone call while reporting on the subjects of this book? KENNETH VOGEL: Yes, many. I don't want to get into the specifics.
The People's Salvation Cathedral, known as the National Cathedral, was opened after 15 years of construction as worshippers and officials arrived in droves. At its highest point the cathedral stands more than 125 meters (410 feet) and has an interior capacity for 5,000 worshippers in the conservative country. The cathedral's interior has been covered with frescoes and mosaics depicting saints and icons, which cover an area of 17,800 square meters (191,000 square feet), according the National Cathedral's website.
Two F-16 jets in eastern Romania were "scrambled on an Air Policing mission to monitor the air situation near the border with Ukraine, following Russian strikes on Ukrainian Danube infrastructure" at 6:05 pm Saturday local time, per a statement from the Romanian defense ministry. The F-16 "detected and tracked" the drone in Romania's airspace from 6:23 pm and radar contact was lost some 12 miles from the small community of Chilia Veche, according to the defense ministry, which emphasized that the drone did not fly over populated areas and "did not pose an imminent threat to the civilian population."
About two-thirds of Romania's diaspora are economic migrants, contributing significantly to the economy through remittances, and many feel politically neglected and invisible.