What the newspapers say: April 17, 2006

Rising Danube flooded tens of hectares of land and produced major damages in 12 counties in Southern Romania, newspapers report unanimously, some of them pointing to a possible failure by local authority to have prevented the flooding of several townships.

The way ministers understand to place cronies and family members in key positions at state enterprises is also tackled. And one newspaper reports how a woman who underwent a surgical intervention managed to leave one hour without blood.

While the level of Danube has stagnated over the weekend after flooding tens of thousands of hectares in Southern Romania, the situation could have been considerably better if authorities had intervened earlier, Adevarul suggests.

It notes that the river gave repeated signals it would rise in the last couple of months, but that Romanian authorities opted to act in the twelfth hour.

Cotidianul agrees, writing that several townships could have been saved from flooding had the ministers of Environment and Administration reacted sooner to proposals coming from prefects long before the damage was done.

The newspaper shows that prefects in the affected counties informed the authorities in Bucharest about the possibility of controlled floods on Friday, but the ministers rejected the offer just to find whole villages flooded over the weekend.

Evenimentul Zilei reports that while the floods failed to make victims so far, hundreds of people have been willingly or forcefully evacuated from their homes. And Jurnalul National defies forecasts of better days and reports the river will reach its peak on Monday.

Meanwhile, Cotidianul also focuses on the shadowy ways some ministers in the current government have placed cronies and family members at the helm of state enterprises. It says Economy minister Codrut Seres named a series of relatives and personal aides in the administration board of the Daewoo Mangalia shipyard. One of them is his own father-in-law, who is also his advisor.

Another strange situation involves Transport minister Gheorghe Dobre, who named Iulian Poenaru, the former manager of a private firm, in no less than seven companies and bodies subordinated to the Transport Ministry, according to Cotidianul.

Romania libera writes about other irregularities, this time at the Romanian Lottery. According to the newspaper, recent media reports about an alleged plan of an interests group to control the cash flow of the Lottery sparked reactions from the current management of the company.

And in an attempt to explain that there wasn’t an official in this regard, Liliana Ghervasuc, head of the Lottery board, named one of the people who tried to force the idea of outsourcing the sales network of the company, the paper writes.

Gandul, meanwhile, is proud to announce that a recent poll shows 29.2% of Romanians consider Cristian Tudor Popescu, the head of the newspaper and of the Romanian Press Club, to be the most trusted journalist-analyst of the moment.

Other trusted media people in Romania are Ion Cristoiu, Marius Tuca, Robert Turcescu, Silviu Brucan si Emil Hurezeanu, all of them known for their talk-shows on various TV stations.

And Evenimentul Zilei writes about the case of a woman from the Romanian city of Constanta who a year ago survived a surgical intervention in which the surgeons brought her body temperature to 16 degrees Celsius and temporarily removed all the blood in her body for almost an hour.

The newspaper writes that Doina Man is now dependent on medicine, but she recovered from most of the effects of the operation, including memory loss, right hand paralysis and a temporary inability to breathe by herself.