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Romania through international eyes

People
People in the News

April 2005

President Traian Basescu visited his American counterpart George W Bush at the White House for meetings that were described as “very fruitful”. Topics discussed included Romania’s foreign policy in the Black Sea, and in a subsequent interview with Le Monde Mr Basescu said, “We make no secret of our interest in the relocation of American forces in Europe, nor of Romania’s willingness to have American bases on its territory.” Later in the month, Mr Basescu visited Romanian troops stationed in Iraq and announced that another 400 soldiers would be mobilised there. The same day three Romanian journalists who had earlier interviewed the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, were kidnapped from a Baghdad street. A damning report from Amnesty International found “inhuman, degrading” conditions inside Romanian psychiatric homes that continued to breach international human rights standards. Adriean Videanu of the Democratic Alliance was elected as Mayor of Bucharest. A group of MEPs were planning to take action against the British government for allowing fertility clinics to pay women in Romania large sums to donate eggs. Prices of goods and services began to be displayed in leu greu terms, with four zeros lopped off them, ahead of the introduction of new banknotes, scheduled for 1st July. Vodafone bought both Connex and the Czech Republic’s Oskar Mobil, the Eastern European phone companies owned by TIW, for about $3.5 billion. The National Statistics Institute said that GDP had risen by 8.3 per cent in 2004. A Timisoara court sentenced a man to 14 years in prison for trafficking cocaine worth more than $2 million. As many as 80,000 unionists planned a protest later this month against government changes to the Employment Code. Two people from Coronini, in Caras-Severin, died after drinking a bottle of motor anti-freeze. Fourteen people in Cluj were injured when a trolleybus crashed into a restaurant. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Belgrade has replaced Bucharest as Europe’s cheapest capital. In two rounds of World Cup qualifiers, Holland beat Romania 2-0 in Bucharest and Romania beat Macedonia 2-1 in Skopje. In the monthly FIFA ratings, Romania’s soccer team ranked 29th in the world in March. Romania’s women’s table tennis team won the European Championships, beating Croatia 3-0 in the final. Ghita Muresan, the NBA basketball player, ranked 5th in Sports Illustrated’s all-time list of ugly basketballers. An Internet survey revealed that only 15 per cent of Romanians are happy with their jobs.

The death of Pope John Paul II brought an outpouring of emotion amongst the world's one billion Catholics.

Pope John Paul II succumbed to heart and kidney failure and died, aged 84, after 26 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church. More than a million people filed through the Vatican to view his body before it was buried. The process of selecting a new pope will be decided by 117 cardinals at meetings starting on 18th April. A recommendation of President George W Bush to appoint neoconservative loyalist Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank drew consternation from senior EU diplomats, although the appointment was eventually agreed after Mr Wolfowitz declared that he would make the alleviation of poverty, particularly in Africa, his major goal. The appointment followed hard on the heels of the likeminded John Bolton to be the US ambassador to the United Nations. In Florida, a brain damaged woman who had been on life support since 1990 became a test case for right to life advocates, although a number of appeals to different legal courts all failed, and she died 13 days after the removal of her feeding tube. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy said that the country would begin pulling its 3,000 troops out of Iraq in September; the Netherlands, Ukraine and Bulgaria are also to withdraw troops. The Iraqi parliament elected Jalal Talabani to be the country’s new president. President Bashar Assad continued to withdraw his forces from Lebanon. A popular uprising in Kyrgyzstan forced President Askar Akayev to flee to Russia, and Kurmanbek Bakiev was named as interim head of state. Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party overwhelmingly won parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe, amongst opposition claims that the vote was rigged. The EU said that accession negotiations with Croatia would not begin until the country became more cooperative in handing over its fugitives from the Balkanic wars of the 1990s to the International War Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Hifikerpunye Pohamba became the second president of Namibia, replacing Sam Nujoma, who led the country to independence 15 years ago. About 1300 people died in an earthquake with a Richter scale reading of 8.7, which had its epicenter at Nias, an island west of Sumatra. A 16-year-old student shot dead his grandfather, his grandfather’s partner, a security guard, a teacher, five students and then himself, at a school on a Native American reservation in Minnesota. Bernie Ebbers, the chairman of Worldcom, the telecoms giant whose collapse in 2002 lost shareholders $180 billion and some 20,000 jobs, was found guilty of nine counts of fraud and conspiracy, and faced a lenghty prison sentence. Dave Allen, the comedian, died, aged 68. Saul Bellow, the writer, died, aged 89. James Callaghan, the prime minister of Britain between 1976 and 1979, died, aged 92. Johnnie Cochran, the celebrated lawyer who successfully defended a number of high profile accused, including O J Simpson, died, aged 67. John DeLorean, whose DeLorean sports car company collapsed in 1983, taking with it $150 million of British government money, died, aged 80. Paul Hester, the drummer with the successful Australian band Crowded House, committed suicide, aged 46. Prince Rainier III of Monaco died, aged 81. Trinidad-born teenager Kerron Clement broke Michael Johnson’s decade-old world record for the indoor 400 metres, clocking 44.57 seconds as opposed to Johnson’s 44.63 seconds. Lawyers representing the singer Michael Jackson, who is accused of ten counts of sexual abuse of minors, called for a mistrial on grounds that jurors had discussed the case outside the courtroom, violating court rules. Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles in a quiet registry office wedding near Windsor Castle. A team of Italian archaeologists digging in Cyprus unearthed the remains of a 4,000-year-old perfume factory, thought to have been a thriving export source of laurel, cinnamon and myrtle.