Heads of state

The fate of the world's 1.7 billion Muslims is no longer in the hands of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Dec. 18.

Prime Minister Ludovic Orban and the Custodian of the Romanian Crown, Margareta, agreed that the Royal House and the Government need to coordinate their international actions, to obtain thus "beneficial results to be capitalized on for Romania." "Obviously, we need to have a good relation between the Royal House and Her Majesty the Custodian of the Crown and the Romanian Government.

The Prime Minister of Malta held an urgent meeting this morning with the ministers involved in resolving the issue and an exemption decision was made, RTS has learned. This means that 22 children of Serbian citizens will receive residence permits and stay in Malta.

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias was kicking off a tour of the Middle East with a visit to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in a bid to address developments in the Eastern Mediterranean following Turkey's maritime border agreement with the Tripoli-based government in Libya, as well as to discuss bilateral ties.

The year 1989 meant the end of the communist regime in the Central and Eastern European countries. Romania was the only ex-communist country in the case of which the switch to democracy was violent, involving protests and street fights, and the only country where the leaders of the former regime got executed.

The only lyric opera dedicated to the 1989 Revolution in Timisoara, dubbed "Romanian Revolution 1989", written by the US composer Aaron Garber will have its first night on Sunday at the National Theatre of western City of Timisoara, and will benefit from the interpretation of the Western University (UVT)'s Music and Theatre Faculty (FMT) students.

"It was important for Yeltsin that Putin was of different generation because the country should not have been left to those who ruled it during the Soviet Union", former Kremlin Head of Administration Valentin Yumashev said during a public interview at the Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg.

The United Nations has warned violence in Bolivia could "spin out of control" following recent skirmishes between security forces and coca farmers loyal to ousted President Evo Morales that have left nine dead.

Witness Dejan Lucic told the retrial of Serbian State Security Service officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday that the defendants did not send Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, to Croatia in 1991 to set up a training camp for rebel Serb fighters.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016, is helping prepare a blueprint for the digitization of Greece's public administration.