Hope you had a restful Easter break. During the break we have been busy building the Romanian Dispatch web platform and producing our first podcasts. We expect to present you with the fruits of our labour soon!
This week news broke that a Liechtenstein prince shot Arthur, Romania’s largest brown bear. Police started investigating this possible poaching case involving the prince, who is reported to have “wrongly” killed the male bear in a trophy hunt on a visit to the Carpathian Mountains in March.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
Mediawatchdog RSF sloeg vorige week alarm dat de persvrijheid in Europa verder is ingeperkt. Er is echter ook goed nieuws. Ondanks de coronapandemie is het met de onafhankelijkheid van de pers in Zuidoost Europa juist beter gesteld dan in 2019.
Prime Minister Florin Cîţu says that if Romanians get vaccinated, the country could return to normal starting the end of July. He ruled out a lockdown despite hospitals facing record number of patients. In Timișoara dozens of people gathered to protest an anti-corona measures demonstration during which xenophobic slogans were shouted. And a new IMF forecast predicts a whopping six percent economic growth for Romania this year.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
The pace of the vaccination campaign is slowing. At the same time the ICU capacity is overstretched with corona patients. The nationalist AUR managed to mobilise people on the streets throughout Romania all week protesting against the COVID-19 measures. Yet the fact that a few hundred protestors showed up in the capital and elsewhere should not be interpreted as a sign that there is not sufficient support for the restrictions to get us out of the pandemic.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
It was the week of strikes and protests. A spontaneous strike of metro personnel threw the capital into chaos on Friday. A day before, police protested cutbacks and poor working conditions. Antivaxxers took to the streets again too. Meanwhile politicians and policy makers could not agree on which new measures should be taken to contain the pandemic.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
On Sunday the state of alert was prolonged for another month. And a new restriction on travel between 10 pm and 5 am was introduced in an attempt to control ever increasing corona infections. But there is also good news, including a historical high on the Bucharest stock exchange and the first Oscar nominations for a Romanian feature film.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
This week the news was dominated by the pandemic. On Sunday more than one thousand anti-vaxxers gathered in front of parliament, the largest gathering to date. Timișoara and four neighbouring communities went into quarantine whereas new measures to prevent the spread of the corona virus went into effect in the capital on Monday. Authorities repealed a batch of AstraZeneca vaccins on Thursday. On the same day, Romania posted 5,236 new COVID-19 cases, the highest rate in over two months.
This and more in this week’s Romanian Dispatch’s coverage of the past seven days. If you like it, why not pass it on? New readers can subscribe here.
BOEKAREST — Ruim duizend Roemenen protesteerden gisteren in Boekarest tegen verplichte vaccinatie. De demonstranten keerden zich ook tegen de invoering van een zogeheten vaccinatie paspoort. De menigte verzamelde zich in het Izvor Park, tegenover het parlement. Slechts weinigen droegen een mondkapje en de meesten hielden zich niet aan de afstandsregels.
“Niet tegen vaccinatie, maar VRIJHEID om zelf te beslissen” was het thema waarmee de organisatoren, de Alliantie van Ouders, de demonstratie hadden aangekondigd. Het protest was gepromoot door AUR, de Alliantie voor een Verenigd Roemenië — de nieuwe extreem-nationalistische partij die in december in het parlement werd gekozen. AUR voorman George Simion en mede-oprichter Claudiu Târziu bevonden zich tussen de demonstranten.
De organisatoren van de grootste anti-vaxx demonstratie totnutoe zijn beboet met een geldstraf van 7.000 lei (€ 1.500) voor het niet nemen van de nodige maatregelen om het aantal deelnemers tot honderd te beperken en voor het niet naleven van andere maatregelen ter bescherming van de gezondheid, aldus de politie.
Zondagnacht werden nieuwe maatregelen van kracht in de hoofdstad om het coronavirus te beteugelen. Cafés en restaurants moeten hun deuren weer sluiten de komende veertien dagen en sommige scholen gaan weer over op on-line onderwijs. In Boekarest zijn sinds vorige week gemiddeld meer dan drie inwoners per duizend met het coronavirus besmet.
The numbers are going up. Daily infection rates are crossing the 4,000 mark frequently and there are now more than 1,000 corona patients in ICU’s again. Four counties and the capital are in the “red scenario”. Meanwhile more than 1 million Romanians have been vaccinated and the pace is picking up. This and more news in this week’s Romanian Dispatch.
Happy Mărțișor. Spring has come at last! While teaching staff started to get vaccinated and the Romanian government donated 20,000 anticorona vaccines to neighbouring Moldova, health authorities are preparing for a third wave of the pandemic. This and more news in this week’s Romanian Dispatch.
