Three Stories

This is the story of a Romanian immigrant living in a hut in Rome. On Tuesday night he found nothing to do. So he noticed a woman walking down the street. He took her by force, he raped her until she fainted and then he threw her into a bush. The woman died today in the hospital. She was the wife of a captain in the Italian Military Marine. The Romanian immigrant was arrested.

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This is the story of another Romanian immigrant. A woman who was passing by the area where the rape took place. She saw a man carrying a lifeless woman on his shoulder. She called the Carabinieri. She could have saved the woman's life. Unfortunately, she didn't. She helped the police catch the rapist anyway.

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This is the story of an Italian mayor. His name is Walter Veltroni and he would get rid of every Romanian in Rome. He would send them home in an instant if the bastards from the European Union said it were ok. Not that he cares too much about the safety of the Italian citizen. He's in the middle of an electoral campaign. He asked the Romanian government to take its rapist back to Romania. The Italian prisons are already full of immigrants. Complicated situation. One that will be never solved.

This is the story in Corriere della Serra.

Why do these things happen?

I don't watch boxing and sports news is something I will never be able to do. But I have to admit that the news of the day in Romania is today a piece of sports news. Sad, but true. While one of the football legends goes to the grave today, other three Romanian boys have become the laughing stock of the whole world.

Three Romanians were thrown out of the World Boxing Championships and banned from amateur boxing for life after being caught trying to steal from a Chicago department store. One of them was a World Champion.

Here is the CNN news.

Ghenadie finally won

Today one famous footballer died. There was fog on the airport, the penal code was modified so that the journalists who use the hidden camera footage face 7 years in jail, one famous hip hop star was released from jail, the fires in California still rage and the oil reached 91 bucks. So I understand why we all were so busy.
Today a few hundred men and women got back their Romanian citizenship taken from their parents when Basarabia became part of the Soviet Union. They didn't get it back as they should have. They came up with all the papers, although some had lost them when Stalin deported their grandparents to Siberia. The Romanian Ministry of Justice ignored their applications for years. They even asked the president for help. And all for nothing.

After years of struggles they won their citizenship at the European Court of Human Rights. Romania was forced to take them back. Today they were sworn in as Romanian citizens. And nobody was there to report it. When exactly have you seen a few hundred people becoming Romanian citizens at the same time, in the same room? Guys, this IS NEWS!

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When I met Ghenadie Brega he was trying to be officially Romanian again. He was struggling to put the statue of Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu in the park in front of the Moldovan government. After a couple of months I found out he was arrested in Chisinau because of the same statue. I'm glad he did it. I'm glad he is now Romanian as I am, and maybe more than that. I'm proud this guy speaks my language and that today Romania gained a person like him.

Check his blog , although it's in Romanian.

The Emblem of Turkey, Kurdish Problem

Not very well filmed, the English needs work, but the story is really good.

The Tulip

How would you run an objective story about an Iraqi Kurd living in Romania at a time when he's watching TV and on every channel he sees his people bombed? What do you think he'd say?

“Nowhere in the world can you find tulips like in Kurdistan. No flower in the world looks down like the tulips in Kurdistan. The legends say the tulip looks down to show the suffering of our people. The flowers cannot take the pain and they weep.”

Urban view

On a certain October morning in busy Bucharest, on one main road where hundreds of cars wait in line for ages, where drivers would curse at anyone who's bold enough to get out of the line and get on the tramway and get to work with a smaller delay, where a police officer would always make things worse and where you would always think you waste a third of your life waiting in your car, it was foggy. On the right side, an empty field they pretend it's a construction site. Some workers waste their time hanging around pretending to be busy. It doesn't matter, it's just another dreary morning. A few meters away, four dirty children, each of them holding a bag very close to the mouth, take turns in hitting something fallen in the grass. Nobody seems to notice them. Just a bunch of kids who raise themselves on the streets who feed themselves inhaling paint thinner, the cheapest drug you can find at the market. They keep hitting and hitting something and they seem to have so much fun. Still, nobody notices them. Not even the construction workers hanging around the truck. The line of cars finally moves, you get to see them closer. They could be hitting an animal. Kids can be cruel sometimes, especially when they're stoned. In 10 minutes you get to move your car gain two meters to the front. Oh, ya. They're hitting a person. A guy dressed in a red coat lies on the ground. He won't move a bit, not even at the hardest kick. Don't bother to call the emergency hotline. You have to wait half an hour and then somebody would tell you they won't go for jokes. And it's just some street kids playing, right?

Youth without Youth

I can hardly wait to see it. A movie made by Francis Ford Coppola inspired by a Romanian Mircea Eliade's short story.

Here's more on the topic in a France Presse news story.

The Insurgents

A bomb blows up in the middle of a crowd. 10, 12, 30, 140 killed. Not important. People crawling in blood baths asking for help from a TV cameraman who's busy pushing the REC button. I've seen it this week, and the week before, and even today. And we all know it was them. The stars of the foreign affairs. Ladies and gentlemen, the insurgents.

Sounds so cold, doesn't it? They're so far it makes you forget they're even people. They're just the Muslim bastards blowing themselves up for the sake of Allah. And you, in your comfortable armchair, you sit in front of the TV and think these people are to blame you've got soldiers dieing in Iraq every day. And you still think that nice smelling elegant politician you saw last night on a talk show is right when he says your government should get the troops out of Iraq. And then you change the channel. The corruption scandal about a minister getting 15000 euro and some booze in exchange for a certain favor is funnier.

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Imagine mom died in a shelling. Then, a week after, dad was arrested, tortured and killed in a prison. He was a suspect because he fired in the air at your cousin's wedding. Imagine all your brothers and sisters die in a friendly fire. And they say they were collateral damage ( e.i. The people who's deaths never mean anything). Tell me you wouldn't go insane and try to blow yourself up to make the people who killed them pay. Tell me that you'd care if your neighbors die with you. Tell me if you'd think about any God when you do this.