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Romania through international eyes

People in the News

October 2005

‘We will be good Europeans and staunch supporters of trans-Atlantic relations with the US,’ President Traian Basescu said at a conference run by the Economist. Later, he exhorted Romanians to desist from giving bribes to public officials, referring to the practice as “a national sport.” Teodor Anastasiu, the Minister of Defence, visited Romania’s 860 troops in Iraq, who Mr Basescu has said would not be withdrawn before the end of 2006. Miron Cozma, the miners’ union leader who led several deadly miners’ riots on Bucharest, had his 10-year prison sentence upheld. Police arrested a Western Europe-bound Turkish truck driver in Nadlac, on the country’s western border, with 260 kilograms of heroin, Romania’s largest ever heroin haul; so far this year police have confiscated 292 kilograms of the drug, compared with 35.5 kilograms in 2004. Timisoara police arrested several people and confiscated 8,200 ecstacy pills from a forest near Baile-Herculane, in Caras-Severin. Thirteen counties and the capital were affected by heavy rains which killed two people, bringing the number that have lost their lives due to flooding over the last three months to 70. One hundred and twenty five Romanians were deported as illegal immigrants from Spain, Italy and France aboard an aeroplane that stopped at airports in all three countries to collect them. Starbuck’s, the world’s largest chain of coffee shops, said that it was likely to open an outlet in Romania by the end of 2006. The Ministry of Finance indicated that excise taxes levied on cigarettes would increase next year to the extent that a packet would cost double what it does now. Alexander Paleologu, a leading intellectual, senator and diplomat, died, aged 86, a day after being awarded a top prize for diplomatic excellency by Traian Basescu. Dinamo Bucharest thrashed the highly fancied Everton 5-1 in a first round, first leg of a Uefa Cup match in Bucharest, then qualified for the second round by losing 0-1 in the return match. Adrian Mutu, Romania’s captain, scored both goals in a World Cup qualifier against the Czech Republic, which Romania won 2-0. Both Andrei Pavel and Victor Hanescu, the country’s two best tennis players, were beaten in the semi-finals of the Romanian Open, which was won by Florent Serra of France. The National Centre of the Academy of Football in Mogosoaia was inaugurated. After an eight-year break, Francis Ford Coppola is to recommence directing films by making Youth Without Youth a story by Romanian writer Mircea Eliade, and filming is to begin in Romania this month. Soprano Anghela Gheorghiu opened the new season at the New York Metropolitan Opera performing the middle act to Puccini’s Tosca. Posters depicting Nicolae Ceausescu, Adolf Hitler and George Bush entitled, ‘A dog loves you just the way you are’ were removed after complaints from the US Embassy.

Romania’s torrential summer rain spreads to Bucharest.
An isolated incident, or the first sign of global warming?

Germany was in turmoil after its two main political parties emerged from a general election having almost dead-heated, with the challenging party led by conservative Angela Merkel winning with 35.2 per cent of the vote and 225 seats, while the incumbent Gerhard Schroeder’s party got 34.3 per cent, and 222 seats. A grand coalition was mooted. The American army in Iraq said it had killed Abdullah al-Juwairi, better known as Abu Azzam, second in rank to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s proclaimed leader in the country. However suicide bombings continued unabated, and 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC, the largest demonstration since the war began in October 2003. Some people were arrested, including Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq the previous year and had led a demonstration outside George Bush’s ranch in Texas, and had then marched to Washington picking up thousands of supporters along the way. The commander of America’s troops in Iraq, General George Casey, said that only one in 86 Iraqi battalions were fit to fight on their own; six months ago, the figure had been three. Twenty six people were killed in a series of orchestrated suicide bombings in tourist locations in Bali. New Zealand’s ruling Labour Party was returned to office after a closely fought election. About 27 per cent of voters in Poland’s general election voted for the center-right Law and Justice Party, giving it victory over the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance, which had been in power for four years. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan nearly continuously for 50 years, won a landslide election victory and Junichiro Koizumi was re-elected as prime minister. The poll win gave the government a clear mandate to move ahead with the privatisation of Japan Post, which runs nearly 25,000 post offices, employs some 400,000 workers and, with its savings bank, has revenue of more than $3 trillion. Gazprom, Russia’s gas monopoly, bought a 73 per cent share in Sibneft, an oil firm, for $13.1 billion. India’s stock exchange barometer, the Sensex, which has risen by 25 per cent this year, hit new highs. Google, the search engine, was sued by a number of authors over its plans to create a vast online library, which the authors said would mean a breach of copyright. Don Adams, who played the secret agent Maxwell Smart in Get Smart, the American sit-com, died, aged 82. Ronnie Barker, the comedian, died, aged 76. Bob Denver, who played Gilligan in the hit American television programme Gilligan’s Island, died, aged 70. Leo Sternbach, the chemist who invented Valium, died, aged 96. Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who helped bring more than 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice, died, aged 96. England beat Australia 2-1 and regained the Ashes, cricket’s most coveted trophy, after 18 years of defeat. Michael Campbell, the New Zealand golfer, won the World Matchplay title. The Sydney Swans won the Australian Football League Grand Final, 72 years after their last win. Photographs of supermodel Kate Moss taking cocaine were printed on the front page of the Daily Mail, a London newspaper. After tracking the health of 43,000 people since the 1970s, Norwegian researchers showed that smoking just one to four cigarettes a day almost tripled the likelihood of developing heart and lung diseases. The Vatican revealed that Pope John Paul’s last words, in Polish, were ‘Let me go to my Father’s house.’ Three people arrested at Munich’s Oktoberfest for filming a nude scene on a Ferris wheel were later released when they claimed it was a sociological experiment to measure responses to unexpected behaviour.