It’s all about the spectacular in Romanian newspapers today, from the intervention of President Traian Basescu into the official campaign against the bird flu virus directly from a hospital room to weird weather conditiond across the country to the success of a Romanian director in Cannes and many, many others.

Evenimentul Zilei reports President Basescu “evaded” from his hospital room, where he’s been following a recovery program after a surgical intervention for hernia, to take the government by its horns for the way it dealt with the latest bird flu outbreak.

According to the newspaper, the first to feel the president’s wrath were Agriculture minister Flutur and Health minister Nicolaescu, as well as the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), Radu Timofte.

Basescu’s main message was the Romanian leaders must put an end to the ongoing authority crisis. For that, he charged PM Calin Popescu Tariceanu with coordinating all efforts in the fight against the H5N1 virus.

A move which may prove the doom of Liberal leader Tariceanu, as his task to single-handedly coordinate everything bird flu seems impossible, as Ziua points out.

And nobody could have averted Basescu’s trampling departure from hospital, as he would have called for a Supreme Defense Council session to discuss the H5 crisis had the government not gathered on the same issue, Cotidianul reports.

The same newspaper reports how Romania lost hundreds of billions of Romanian lei on “invented disasters” under the previous government led by Social Democrat Adrian Nastase.

Documents resulting from inquiries into the lack of funds and of initiative among specialized authorities after last year’s floods show the 2000-2004 government delivered that much money to various parties, through illegal governmental decisions.

Some of the problems the funds should have been used for had been signaled as dramatic disasters as long as ten years in advance, according to Cotidianul.

Back to today’s agenda, it would not be a shock if a real disaster follows the heat wave and the torrential rains announced for June and July, as Evenimentul Zilei suggests. The newspaper reports that while the average temperatures of June 2005 did not exceed 30 degrees Celsius, it may well reach 35 degrees in the coming month.

The news comes as some 1000 people reported health problems after temperatures as high as 36 degrees took over Bucharest yesterday.

These are the conditions that up to 20,000 trade union protesters had to face when they demonstrated in the Romanian capital yesterday. But the protest – calling for higher wages and pensions – proved quite a spectacle despite the high temperatures, according to Gandul.

The newspaper says the demonstrators brought “the relaxation protest” to the streets of Bucharest, as their initiative was accompanied by music, comedy moments with professional actors and all the comfort of ecologic public toilets.

Meanwhile, Romanian director Catalin Mitulescu’s first feature movie “How I spent the end of the world” had similar success in this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival in France, according to Evenimentul Zilei.

The success was not among the masses but among critics, who could not ignore the fact that Mitulescu had received the support of cinema gurus such as Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders in producing his 1.5 million euro picture.

It was nothing funny about what happened to the speaker of the Chinese Parliament visiting Bucharest, however, as Adevarul reports.

The diplomatic protocol rose serious issues when a delegation led by Assembly speaker Wu Bangguo were served rare stakes and white whine at the Romanian hotel they accommodated – in full contradiction to the Chinese eating habits.

The situation prompted the Romanian House of Deputies to announce its intentions to drop the services of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, where the embarrassing moment occurred.

The same Adevarul reports another strange situation from the Romanian Parliament: deputies consider replacing the Romanian flag on the roofs of the Parliamentary Palace with a hologram imitating everything from flag texture to wind effects, as strong winds have destroyed numerous flags throughout the years: some 200 million Romanian lei were spent for the replacement of flags in the first part of 2006 alone.