Radio România Internațional

Tag: centers

  • July 13, 2023 UPDATE

    July 13, 2023 UPDATE

    STRIKE Disgruntled with
    their salaries, trade unionists from Romania’s public finances on Thursday
    picketed the headquarters of the Finance Ministry in Bucharest. Their main
    claim is that the pay of the employees of ANAF and the Finance Ministry be
    adjusted in keeping with the inflation rate. Protesters have also asked for
    decent working conditions, for legislating the professional status and covering
    the staff deficit. Also on Thursday, representatives of cancer patients in
    Romania protested in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Health,
    disgruntled by the fact that the provisions in the National Plan for Combating
    and Controlling Cancer are not applied from the beginning of this month under a
    law endorsed with a landslide majority in Parliament, promulgated by president
    Klaus Iohannis and which has been in force since the beginning of the year.








    WEATHER Meteorologists on Thursday issued a code yellow alert for extremely hot
    weather valid until Sunday in several counties in Romania’s western, eastern
    and central regions. The heat-humidity comfort index is expected to exceed the
    critical threshold of 80 units with highs between 35 and 37 degrees centigrade.
    The weather is significantly cooling in the rest of the regions with highs ranging
    between 25 and 33 degrees Celsius.






    HEAT A heat wave struck southern Europe
    on Thursday, and according to Reuters, authorities have cautioned against
    record highs next week. A weather warning has been issued for the Canary
    Islands, an archipelago belonging to Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Greece. Authorities
    in Greece have announced that temperatures can reach 43 or 44 degrees Celsius on
    Friday or Saturday. Europe’s hottest temperature, 48.8 degrees centigrade, was
    recorded in Sicily in August 2021, but, according to the European Space Agency,
    it could be exceeded next week.






    RESIGNATION
    The Romanian Labor Minister Marius Budai stepped down on Thursday amid a
    scandal regarding the care centers for the elderly. The Romanian authorities are
    carrying on investigations at residential social centers throughout the
    country. More than 1,500 centers have been checked so far, and 15 nursing homes
    for the elderly, the disabled and children have been closed down. The activity
    of another 26 has been suspended. The authorities have issued 60 fines worth
    almost 800,000 lei (the equivalent of about 160 thousand Euros). A nursing home
    that was operating illegally was identified and a criminal case was also opened
    for abuse of office, fraud, false declarations, unlawful practicing of a
    profession and tax evasion in the case of a commercial company that owns three
    nursing homes. On the other hand, the Bucharest Court of Appeal will judge on
    July 20 the appeals made by the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime
    and Terrorism (DIICOT) regarding the placement under house arrest, under
    judicial control or the failure to take any measures in the case of the 20
    defendants detained last week in the investigation regarding the nursing homes
    for the elderly and the people with disabilities from Ilfov county (south, near
    Bucharest), where the so-called beneficiaries were beaten, insulted, starved,
    subjected to forced labor and deprived of minimum hygiene conditions.


    (bill)

  • Abuses in Romania’s Foster Care Facilities

    Abuses in Romania’s Foster Care Facilities

    Less than one month after being sworn in, the mandate
    of Romania’s new Prime Minister, Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu seems to be quite
    uncomfortable as early as the onset. Besides the present problems, Ciolacu now
    has to handle a widely-covered media scandal with political and legal
    implications: the horrific abuses in several old people’s homes around the
    capital city Bucharest.


    The Prime Minister summoned his team on Sunday to
    assess the situation in the Ilfov County, southern Romania, after prosecutors had
    identified organized criminal groups which were exploiting and abusing helpless
    individuals. The head of the Romanian government has
    called on the field authorities to carry out inspections in all the foster
    facilities for children, disabled or elderly people, be they state-owned or
    private.


    According to the Prime Minister, it is unacceptable
    for the institutions in charge to shift the blame for what happened. I have no
    mercy for the scoundrels that have created these horror centers and the fact
    that something like that was possible shows only one thing: we are actually
    dealing with a flawed system. The system must be changed’ – the Prime Minister
    says. His statement comes after the anti-mafia prosecutors from DIICOT have
    launched an investigation at three old-people’s centers in Voluntari and Afumaţi,
    two of Bucharest’s satellite towns, for the inhuman treatment their residents have
    been subjected to. Several people have already been apprehended in a file known
    as ‘The Retirement Centers of Horror’, including the one who initiated the
    business and was unknown until now, Ştefan Godei. According to prosecutors,
    Godei has so far raked in the equivalent of more than half a million Euros in
    less than two years. He used to spend a large part of this money on drugs,
    prostitutes and parties, while the elderly were being treated like prisoners in
    concentration camps: beaten, insulted, starved, forced to do the most
    humiliating tasks and deprived of minimum hygiene conditions. Nearly one hundred of these people have already
    been taken over by SMURD paramedics to be transferred to hospitals and other
    treatment facilities.


    In the meantime, the opposition in
    Bucharest has called for the resignation of the Minister of Family, Gabriela Firea,
    a Social Democrat like the Prime Minister, whom the press blames for being
    linked to the file. Her husband, Florentin Pandele, has been mayor of the town
    of Voluntari for 23 years now while one of his sisters has headed the Social
    Assistance system in the Ilfov County. The one the journalists have dubbed ‘the
    Infamous Godei’ used to be Firea’s driver while the latter was mayor of
    Bucharest between 2016 and 2020. No one is invoking criminal charges for Firea
    in the aforementioned retirement centers file, but many agree that her public
    image has been seriously tarnished and is presently affecting both the
    government and the party. Few are those who believe that she still stands
    chances to become Bucharest mayor again after she announced her intention to
    run for this seat in the local election next year.


    (bill)