National Press Review, 12 January

The scandal between President Băsescu and Raed Arafat drew the attention of the Romanian media in the past days.

In other words, the Adevărul: ‘Bodyguards, ready to take you on a stretcher. Security companies are eager to provide emergency services also.’ Private clinics and hospitals have been providing for several years now emergency services and that already have a long experience in the field. The ones in the private system see their services as an aid for the current system of emergency, which is undersised.

As for the critics, Alina Mungiu from the Romanian Academic Society, claims that the health draft law does not solve the problems: the number of taxpayers will still be insufficient, the system destined the poor will be even more underfunded, the doctors will still have low wages and they will receive as before money or gifts in kind.

Under the headline ‘Tortured and humiliated in the name of Justice’, România Liberă writes about the sacrifice of the undercover agent from the General Anticorruption Directorate, the key witness in the arrest of 30 policemen in Section 3 of Bucharest. She played the role of a prostitute, was sequestered, stripped, humiliated and beaten, even inside the police station. From the newspaper we learn how the policemen increased their incomes by cashing the protection tax from prostitutes.

Another topic of the România Liberă: ‘Mafia SRL, the largest investor in Europe.’ With 65 billion euros assets, the mafia has become the largest bank in Italy, swallowing enterprises on the verge of bankruptcy. Organized in an association of 270 000 small and medium enterprises with an annual turnover of 100 billion, or 7 percent of Italy’s GDP, it has incomes higher than the Italian oil tycoon ENI. What does the mafia offer in times of crisis? Jobs.

Those who gain from the crisis are those starting the pyramid schemes. Caritas revived and it is not the only one, we read in the front page of the Evenimentul Zilei: ‘Hungarian Caritas ruins Transylvania.’ They infiltrated by aggressive advertising in the local media and they speculate the poor’s despair.

You pay the registration fee at stake, 1 360 lei, you pay 156 lei monthly and you ‘receive the money when hell freezes over’, because after it reached its target, the company disappears as if it never existed. The police and the Directorate for Investigation of Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) did not react, journalists noted.

In the Jurnalul Naţional: ‘The Caltaboş file, a hot dog’ – that’s what's left of the corruption case in which two ministers were involved, Decebal Traian Remes and Ioan Muresan. 2008: the media roared of audio and video interceptions. 2012: the 33rd session of the trial after two raises of unconstitutionality, and many, many postponements.

In the Jurnalul Naţional we also read that ‘E-s are children's main dish, according to a recent study. From the first days of their lives, most children are deprived of a healthy diet: only 31 percent of babies are breastfed.

What do they get instead? Milk powder full of additives. From 6 months onwards diversification begins: puffs, biscuits, potatoes, these are the main foods in the diet of the little ones.

Translated by: Iulia Florescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University