Word: bucharest
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...half a foreign debt that passed the $12 billion mark in 1982, Rumania has exported so much of its farm output that its own people are often forced to do without staples such as eggs and beef. To conserve scarce energy supplies, Ceausescu has barred private cars from Bucharest streets, urged citizens to use 40-watt light bulbs and farmers to replace tractors with horses or oxen. Says a Western diplomat in Bucharest: "The Rumanians are going backward, at least to the 19th century --maybe to the 18th...
Ironically, for a Soviet bloc country, Rumania relies on good relations with the U.S. to bolster its economy. Last month President Reagan extended the trade status of most-favored nation to Rumania for the eleventh straight year, after Bucharest agreed to allow more than 1,000 people to emigrate. The regime will thus be able to continue exporting to the U.S. without paying extra duties. Reagan granted the extension despite misgivings about alleged Rumanian human rights abuses, which range from torture and long-term political imprisonment to religious persecution...
Rumania has been hard hit by the disaster at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April. After the accident spread radioactive fallout across Eastern Europe, the European Community banned imports of crops and livestock from the region for three weeks. The embargo slashed the Bucharest regime's foreign-exchange earnings and forced the cash-short country to miss several million dollars in debt payments to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other Western lenders...
...Nicolae two years later, when she was elected queen of the parade at a May Day celebration. As Nicolae climbed the political ladder, Elena rose as well. When her husband assumed party leadership, she was quickly named director of the Bucharest Central Institute of Chemical Research, and today she is also chairman of the National Council for Science and Technology. Yet her technical background and competence are widely questioned in academic circles...
...Because his highly centralized economy has faltered badly, living standards are so low that the government requires citizens to light each room with only a single 40-watt bulb and for no more than six hours a day. Indeed, Shultz and his entourage decided not to stay overnight in Bucharest in part because they were unsure whether there would be adequate light and heat. When the Secretary's motorcade left the capital at 6 p.m., the city was already as blacked out as London during the Blitz...