The Observer, in short

Lead article Ovidiu Simonca socks it to Bucharest’s mayor, Adrien Videanu, who was unable to answer basic questions about city planning last week in the face of a report from the Save Bucharest Association that concludes Bucharest is an urban disaster. The announcement can’t have come as a surprise, so perhaps it wasn’t startling either that the mayor was unable to explain Bucharest’s chaotic construction, the presence of new buildings that don’t respect the General Urban Plan, or his failure to intervene in favor of more than a thousand architecturally valuable houses bulldozed in this city as if overnight. In any event, his honor put in a spectacularly poor show on Stelian Tanase’s 3×3 on Realitatea TV. Interviewed in this issue, Nicusor Dan, head of the Save Bucharest Association, discusses urban ecology and the bulldozing of architectural treasures. Politics Ciprian Ciucu describes the failures of Romania’s three post-revolutionary presidents: the first failed to grasp the mechanisms of modernization, the second failed to understand the mechanisms of power and the third does not understand the mechanisms of democracy. Bedros Horasangian writes dismissively about President Basescu’s dream of turning the press into personal “trumpeteers.