Possible irregularities in the efforts of Romanian authorities to protect the population from swollen Danube waters re-emerge in today’s newspapers.

But despite the difficult situation produced by floods in southern Romania, football takes center stage with preparations for Steaua Bucharest’s first leg of the UEFA Cup semifinals against Middlesbrough tonight.

The newspapers don’t miss the usual scandals related to politics, yoga and others.

Steaua is ready for a new revolution, Pro Sport writes in a preview for the match against the English team tonight. The newspaper quotes Steaua coach Cosmin Olaroiu who has said he wished his team would defeat Middlesbrough without receiving any goal, but has warnet that one should not expect a typical English game from the rival eleven.

Sport Total, on the other hand, is focusing on who is missing from the English team and mentions Mark Viduka and Gareth Southgate and several others, most of them suffering from injuries in the previous matches.

But the newspaper quotes Middlesbrough representative Steve McClaren who said in a press conference fans should not worry as there were good replacements for the missing ones.

Evenimentul Zilei quotes Mircea Lucescu, the father of Rapid coach Razvan Lucescu and a former coach of Rapid himself, who said "we will all Steaua fans tonight!" That comes as Rapid was defeated by Steaua in the UEFA Cup quarterfinals.

And while the online publication Onlinesport.ro goes religious and writes about "Steaua’s Good Thursday", in reference to the coming Orthodox Easter, another online website, askMen, reports that bets registered at sports gambling houses give the advantage to Steaua in the match against Middlesbrough.

The impact of Danube floods in southern Romania is also the source of many reports in newspapers today, now focusing on potential irregularities committed in areas where people connected to political parties tried to protect their businesses.

After a similar report in Cotidianul earlier this week, Evenimentul Zilei writes that a donor for the opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD) has saved his lands in the affected area from a controlled flooding "in a miraculous way".

Lebanese Juhad Ibrahim El-Khalil controls 22,000 hectares of land in the Gostinu-Greaca area at the border between the Calarasi and Giurgiu counties, some of the areas most severely hit by floods.

According to the newspaper, the prefects of the two districts informed Environment minister Sulfina Barbu that the zone known as Balta Greaca cannot be flooded because there are many houses there. But according to a local mayor there is no house, but several buildings of former state-controlled agricultural farms, now belonging to a firm of the Lebanese citizen, a known donor for the PSD party.

Also on Danube floods, Adevarul reports that in an evacuated area in the county of Dolj prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu was booed by protesting displaced people.

And Cotidianul warns that not only Danube, but most Romanian rivers will swell beyond danger levels in the coming Orthodox Easter days due to increased rain falls.

Elsewhere in the newspapers, European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn will be hard pressed by the Foreign Affairs Commission of the European Parliament to support a rigorous system of monitoring for Romania and Bulgaria even if the countries join the EU on January 1, 2007, as Adevarul reports.

It says such a system would allow for the activation of safeguard clauses in the first three years since accession, maintaining a high level of pressure for reform in the two countries until 2009.

And Gandul revolts about two broadcasts of the public TV station TVR in which a crisis related to a yoga movement, MISA, led by an individual who has recently received political asylum in Sweden, is analyzed in journalistic investigations.

Gandul is angry with the fact that TVR only quoted members of the MISA movement, who consider themselves discriminated, and no other party involved in the case.

The same Gandul also mentions revelations by former President Emil Constantinescu, according to whom ex-PM Radu Vasile, who headed the Romanian Government in late nineties when Constantinescu was in office, was an "informer" of the former Communist secret police, the Securitate.

According to the newspaper, Constantinescu saw Vasile’s Securitate file but accepted to name him prime minister at the pressure of the head of a political party then in power.