It’s all about who forgets or recalls what in today’s newspapers in Romania, doing their best to deliver their some variations to their readers in a period when the bird flu crisis is sucking most public attention.

A criminal is at free because judges forgot to extend his preventive arrest, the government abuses displaced people from the flooded regions thanks to a lack of public awareness. And even in the fight against bird flu they seemed to forget about major political “chicken issues” of the past – but remembered them in due time.

Just when everybody thought the teams slaughtering the chicken in suspected regions will forget about the chicken farm owned by former prime minister Adrian Nastase, vets have entered his farming property in the town of Cornu, in the mountainous part of the Prahova county, according to Evenimentul Zilei.

There Nastase, who once challenged inquiring journalists to “check his eggs”, should fear the worst as a Prahova is one of the counties most affected by the H5N1 virus, and a possible hotbed was identified just streets away from the ex-PM’s farm.

Also in Evenimentul Zilei, authorities decided to lift the quarantine set in villages and towns across the country, just as thousands of affected people thought the Health Ministry would forget and leave them isolated for no real purpose.

The news comes after World Health Organization experts told the International herald Tribune that human quarantine was not necessary in Romania.

According to Cotidianul, authorities seem to have forgotten a much more serious something: the current prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu, who was ordered by the President to lead anti-bird flu efforts, can operate by word of mouth alone as he has no legal basis to sign orders.

That is, because Tariceanu himself introduced a governmental decision in October last year, placing the whole decision-making process on the shoulders of the Agriculture minister.

Cotidianul also reports that a parliamentary commission supervising the activity of the Romanian Intelligence Service – SRI failed to pull anything from SRI head Radu Timofte, whom the commission grilled yesterday.

The parliamentarians wanted to learn how come a SRI report on the source of the current H5 epidemic contained serious errors, but left the meeting wondering who should really bear the responsibility, as they “learned” the report should have been double-checked by other institutions.

According to Gandul, that would not count too much for the Hungarian Agriculture minister who was quoted yesterday as saying that charges included in the SRI report, that chicken imported from Hungary led to the Romanian outbreak, carried a serious political and diplomatic problem.

“Such accusations are not usually made against EU countries”, the minister said.

The real problem, for Evenimentul Zilei, is different however: judges forgot to extend a preventive arrest warrant for a man charged with murder, suspected of torturing and raping his victims before killing them.

The judicial “omission” means the man is now free – and he belongs to one of the strongest criminal gangs operating in southern Romania.

Also in Evenimentul Zilei, the American hosts seem to have forgotten to care about the Romanian national team who arrived there for a preparatory tourney before the preliminaries of the EURO 2008 championship.

In a Californian hotel, they discovered they only had access to cold water for showers, and rumors say they were even passed by the restaurant staff, who allegedly forgot to lay their tables.

Meanwhile, Adevarul notes that while most Romanians forgot about the serious situation of people displaced by floods earlier this year – an issue no longer tackled in TV news shows – the government might opt to limit the subsidies for the reconstruction of flood-damaged houses at only 20%.

The newspaper says full subsidies will be provide only for the elderly, the jobless and for those who don’t have relatives to assist them.

And Gandul reports that the Romanian authorities have only now remembered to ask the European Union to “sweeten” some of the accession terms which should have been negotiated properly long ago.

The newspaper mentions the situation of Romanian bakeries, as even the smallest of them must invest up to three million euro to reach the standards imposed by Brussels.