National Press Review, December 10

The Government is adding an extra 600 lei to allowance for multiple pregnancies, today’s Jurnalul Naţional reads.

According to the emergency ordinance passed by the Government, the extra allowance is meant for mothers who give birth during their maternity leave.

For handicapped children parents will take a three year leave.

The Evenimentul Zilei prints: In a desperate attempt to take advantage of the law currently in force, tens of future mothers in their last months of pregnancy have rushed to gynecologists for C-sections, in order to give birth on 31st December at the latest.
Despite the fact that this is a very risky intervention, especially for the newly-borns.

The same daily also prints: ‘100 000 Euro nurseries’ and explains – In order to account for their decision to cut the maternity leave, and, in some cases, the allowance, the Government has offered another option, which may determine parents to go back to work earlier: 100 000 euro nurseries which can accommodate at least 20 children.

Today’s România Liberă reads: Austerity with new cars and holiday bonuses. PM Emil Boc declared that the 2011 budget is ‘development-oriented.’

However, annex buildings of each institution show that it’s the dignitaries’ collections of cars and furniture that are actually developing.

In absolute figures, when it comes down to the allocated budget, it seems the luckiest were the Presidential Administration, the Protection and Guard Service, the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism and the Permanent Electoral Authority.

In the Gândul we read about how the VIP airport with a 1,2 billion euro airport will look like.
‘Henri Coandă’ Airport will turn into an Otopeni-based ‘Heathrow’, while the ‘Aurel Vlaicu’ Airport will become a Băneasa-based ‘London City’, the authorities promise.

Transport Minister Anca Boagiu mentioned that Metrorex will soon make a fesability study to connect the ‘Aurel Vlaicu’ Airport with the Bucharest subway system. The global cost of the project is 5.3 billion lei, 6 million of which will be spent in 2011 on technical support and consultancy.

In the same newspaper we read that the EU doubts that honey, carrots and fruit improve health state.

The reason: the food is being tested as if it were medicine.

The European Food Safety Authority has decided that not even yoghurt is that beneficial to health. None of the thousands of test samples has passed the test.
Even medicinal plants, honey and eggplants ‘failed.’

‘In the past, the European Food Safety Authority has rejected all antioxidants in fruit, vegetables or medicinal plants, although man has been living off of these for thousands of years,’ Professor Gheorghe Mencinicopschi, head of the Food Research Institute, declared for the Gândul.â

The reason they fail the tests is simple: they are being tested with the same methods as medicine.

Translated by Gabriela Lungu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University