National Press Review, 21 March

The military operation in Libya launched by the western coalition and the bribery scandal in Brussels make the front-page headlines in today’s Bucharest newspapers.

The Jurnalul Naţional writes ‘Libya is on fire. Gaddafi gets crazy’. According to the newspaper, France triggered the attack of the international coalition against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The România Liberă supports the same theory under the front-page headline ‘French-style war’.

The Evenimentul Zilei writes ‘Allied forces rain bombs on Gaddafi’, while the Gândul writes ‘Gaddafi’s forces take reprisals despite air bomb attacks’.

‘Brother Leader’ denounced the strikes as ‘unjustified crusader aggression’ that destroyed the air defence capacities and threatened that ‘the interests of the countries participating in the aggression face danger from now on.’

The Adevărul writes on the same topic ‘Gaddafi turns his people into kamikaze.’ The Tripoli leader threatens to retaliate against the western coalition that dropped bombs on Libya and is preparing his people to defend him.

Today’s newspapers have another common topic. ‘Adrian Severin faces bribery allegations in European Parliament’, writes the Jurnalul Naţional.

‘Romanian MP accepted 12 000 euros from journalists posing as lobbyists.’ He issued an invoice for the alleged representatives of a lobby company (who actually were The Sunday Times journalists). 12 000 euros for consultancy services on the bank deposit scheme draft that will be discussed in Parliament.

The România Liberă writes ‘Severin’s price: 12 000 euros.’

The Evenimentul Zilei writes ‘Adrian Severin caught in money trap set by lobbyist journalists.’ Moreover, he and two other fellow MP colleagues, a Slovakian and an Austrian, are the subject of a serious scandal in Brussels.

The Adevărul also writes about ‘the file of the edition’. The newspaper analyses within six pages the ‘NIF business, greed x-ray’, over 300 000 defrauded people and a fraud worth almost 400 million euros.

The Adevărul writes that the National Investment Fund missed none of the possible fraud methods, some of them highly sophisticated, others incredibly basic.

Finally, today’s newspapers praise the victory scored by Lucian Bute yesterday, when the Super Middleweight champion defended his world title for the seventh time.

Translated by: Raluca Mizdrea
MA Student, MTTC, Bucharest University