Romania

ATLANTA -- Octavian Belu says there is no magic, no mystery and no mercy about his Romanian women's gymnastics team."The secret is to work seven hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "We must stay in the training all the time. Be a family. We want to replace the family, mothers and fathers. The gymnasts make some sacrifice. They accept rules."And they win.This may make American television executives nervous, but it's the Romanians, not the Americans, who are the favorites to take the women's team gold and dominate the first week of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Susan and Dragos Tudor , of Mount Airy, announce the birth of their son, Landon Gheorghe Tudor , on April 27, 2011, at 12:51 p.m. He weighed 9 pounds. His brother is Aiden. His grandparents are John and Joan Green, of Ellicott City; and Ion and Aurelia Tudor, of Bucharest, Romania.

BUCHAREST, Romania -- As Pope John Paul II prayed at an open-air Orthodox Mass yesterday at the side of Patriarch Teoctist, Cristian Andrei, 40, examined the historic moment from mammon's perspective."

BUCHAREST, Romania - A year ago, the idea that Romania and Bulgaria might join NATO this autumn in the next round of enlargement seemed laughable, and many thought that the membership aspirations of the Baltic nations might be held hostage again to relations with Moscow. But in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and with the war on terrorism, the southern flank of NATO suddenly seems more important, and the domestic blemishes of such candidate countries as Romania less important. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia apparently has decided not to make too big a fuss over Baltic memberships in return for more influence with NATO, a better relationship with the United States and a freer hand in Chechnya, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.

ON Oct. 22, exactly one day after Congress granted Romania most-favored-nation trade status, a statue of Ion Antonescu was erected in the town of Slobozia, near Bucharest.General Antonescu, the fascist dictator during World War II, was responsible for the deaths of at least 250,000 Jews and 20,000 Gypsies. This is the first statue of a war criminal from Eastern Europe erected since the war.The dedication was attended by government officials such as Mihai Ungheanu, an aide to former President Nicolae Ceausescu and currently secretary of state for culture, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a member of Parliament who is a vicious anti-Semite.

Nicu Ceausescu, 45, the hard-drinking playboy son of Romania's late communist dictator, died yesterday at General Hospital in Vienna, Austria, where he had been treated for internal bleeding, a hospital spokeswoman said. His parents, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who ruled Romania for a quarter-century, were executed by a firing squad after a hurried trial on Christmas Day 1989.William John Curran, 71, a public health attorney and Harvard University professor who helped establish health law as a specialty, died of cancer Sunday in Falmouth, Mass.

The former Communists who rule Romania in the name of anti-communism have taken good-faith steps toward a post-Communist economy. Reforms presented to a special session of parliament by the economy and finance minister, Eugen Dimarescu, have the ring of the real thing. They include a floating exchange rate, a writing-off of inter-business debt, price liberalization and provisions for bankruptcy -- all part of the wrenching dismantlement of a disastrous command economy.The active diplomacy of President Ion Iliescu and Prime Minister Petre Roman seems to be overcoming world reluctance to believe that Romania genuinely overthrew communism in 1989 when President Nicolae Ceausescu fell.

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Jews and Gypsies have become the new outcasts of Romania, blamed in a hysterical new propaganda campaign for its problems. Vigilante groups have lynched Gypsies and burned down their houses.The new atmosphere has brought echoes of the vitriolic nationalism that was the hallmark of Romania's quasi-fascist governments of the late 1930s and early 1940s. It comes only four years after the revolution that overthrew Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and won sympathy throughout the world.

SLOBOZIA, Romania -- The King of Kitsch leans on a balcony railing of one of his hotels here and surveys the theme park below him -- 200 acres of what one observer calls a "pop cultural nightmare.""It took us one year to build that steel tower," says the P. T. Barnum of the Balkans. The 160-foot Junior Eiffel Tower is a strange sight in this remote and low-lying farmland, 75 miles east of Bucharest.Ilie Alexandru is a 46-year-old Romanian who made a fantasy come true, had it taken away from him, and now, after a prison sojourn, is back in business.

I have a small group of Romanian friends who are different and more delicate than my other friends. We live and work outside Romania and part of what draws us together is our love for our birthplace.One of these people, a gentle religious scholar named Ioan P. Colianou, was murdered last week in Chicago. It was a brutal and mysterious murder. He was found in a locked bathroom stall at the Divinity School of Chicago, shot in the head. No money or valuables were taken. Someone had shot him over the top of the next stall.