Romania

Operation Desert Thunder was a response to threats by Iraq's president Saddam Hussein to shoot down U-2 spy planes, and violate the no-fly zone set... up over his country. The operation was designed to bring stability to the region by bringing in a military presence during the negotiations between Iraq and the UN over weapons of mass destruction. The name Operation Desert Thunder has been applied to the build-up of forces in the Persian Gulf region during 1998. If an actual attack had been ordered and executed, the name would have changed to Operation Desert Viper. In the autumn of 1997 CENTCOM established a force of 35,000 air, land, and sea forces in response to Iraq's non-compliance of UN resolutions. CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief General Anthony Zinni established a permanent Coalition/Joint Task Force at Camp Doha Kuwait under command of Lieutenant General Tommy Franks to lead this force. The coalition would consist of forces from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom, United States, and Kuwait. On 18 January 1998 additional forces were brought in to support the US-led coalition forces in the region. The U.S.
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World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict that was underway by 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved most of the world's... nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million military personnel mobilised. In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by significant events involving the mass death of civilians, including the Holocaust and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it is the deadliest conflict in human history, resulting in 50 million to over 70 million fatalities. Although Japan was already at war with China in 1937, the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and most of the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Germany set out to establish a large empire in Europe.
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The First Jassy–Kishinev Offensive, named after the two major cities in the area, was fought between 8 April and 6 June 1944 by the Soviets... and Axis powers of World War II. The offensive was actually a coordinated invasion of Romania conducted by Red Army's 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts, in accordance with Joseph Stalin's strategy to project Soviet military power and political influence into the Balkans. According to the plans of the Main Command of the Soviet Military , the two Soviet fronts would cut-off Axis vital defensive lines in Northern Romania. This then would facilitate a subsequent advance by the Red Army into the entire Balkan region. The Soviet attack commenced with the First Battle of Târgu Frumos and Battle of Podu Iloaiei, and culminated with the Second Battle of Târgu Frumos. However, Soviet forces failed to overcome German defenses in the region and the offensive operation ultimately failed. This happened mainly due to the low combat performance of the Soviet troops, as well as the well-prepared German defensive positions.
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The Second Battle of Târgu Frumos, part of the First Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, was a military engagement primarily between the Wehrmacht and Red... Army forces in May 1944, near Iaşi, Romania. The battle resulted from a Stavka order to the forces of the 2nd & 3rd Ukrainian Fronts to commence a coordinated invasion of Romania. It was directed towards Iaşi with a secondary objective of establishing bridgeheads across the Prut river. The battle was only briefly described by Soviet historians. Recently, Russian historians have begun describing this as a distinct battle. For example the four volume Great Patriotic War" prepared for the Russian Federation states: Thus, during the Târgu-Frumos operation, the 2nd Ukrainian Front's forces tried unsuccessfully to complete a deep penetration of the enemy's defense and reach the territory between the Prut & Seret Rivers. By order of the Stavka, they themselves went over to the defensive along existing lines on 6 May. The several attempts by the 3rd Ukrainian Front's armies to conduct attacks from their Dnestr bridgeheads & seize new bridgeheads also led to nothing.
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The Zangger Committee, also known as the Nuclear Exporters Committee, sprang from Article III.2 of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear... Weapons which entered into force on March 5, 1970. Under the terms of Article III.2 International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards must be applied to nuclear exports. Between 1971 and 1974, a group of 15 nuclear supplier states held a series of informal meetings in Vienna chaired by Professor Claude Zangger of Switzerland. The group's objective was to reach a common understanding on: the definition of "equipment or material especially designed or prepared for the processing, use or production of special fissionable material;" and the conditions and procedures that would govern exports of such equipment or material in order to meet the obligations of Article III.2 on the basis of fair commercial competition. The group, which became known as the Zangger Committee, decided that it would be informal and that its decisions would not be legally binding upon its members.
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The Southeast European Cooperative Initiative, or the SECI, has been an initiative that, under the auspices of men like Erhard Busek and Richard... Schifter, has been successful in providing stability in an unstable region and has found support in international organizations and countries. As of 2009, the region has found confidence in its new stability and along with the help of the SECI, has created a Regional Co-operation Council , owned and run by the countries in Southeast Europe aimed at strengthening peace, democracy and the economy in the hopes that the newfound stability can be supported by those countries who not so long ago were the perpetuators of volatility. The SECI Regional Center Headquarters is located in Bucharest Romania. The Southeast European Cooperative Initiative was formed in 1996 under the guidance of then, Senior Director for Eastern Europe in the United States National Security Council, Richard Schifter.
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The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes. The World Bank's... official goal is the reduction of poverty. By law, all of its decisions must be guided by a commitment to promote foreign investment, international trade and facilitate capital investment. The World Bank differs from the World Bank Group, in that the World Bank comprises only two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association , whereas the latter incorporates these two in addition to three more: International Finance Corporation , Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency , and International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes . The World Bank is one of five institutions created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The International Monetary Fund, a related institution, is the second. Delegates from many countries attended the Bretton Woods Conference. The most powerful countries in attendance were the United States and United Kingdom, which dominated negotiations. Although both are based in Washington, D.C.
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The Council of Europe is an international organisation promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human... rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation. It was founded in 1949, has 47 member states with some 800 million citizens, and is an entirely separate body from the European Union , which has only 27 member states. Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws. The two do however share certain symbols such as the flag of Europe. The Council of Europe has nothing to do with either the Council of the European Union or the European Council, which are both EU bodies. The best known bodies of the Council of Europe are the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, and the European Pharmacopoeia Commission, which sets the quality standards for pharmaceutical products in Europe. The Council of Europe's work has resulted in standards, charters and conventions to facilitate cooperation between European countries.
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The University of Oradea is a public University, located in Oradea, in North-Western Romania. With its four colleges and 18 faculties, has a total... of 123 fields of study for undergraduates and 151 post-graduate specialisation degrees. The University employs 2,003 people, of which 1,237 are teaching personnel, and over 35,000 students . The University of Oradea is collaborating with 214 universities, institutes and companies from 31 countries. It is integrated in the European Union's Socrates and Erasmus programs. There are over 800 international students enrolled in various Faculties. The University of Oradea has three lecture halls, each with 640 seats, 22 amphitheatres with a total of 1940 seats, as well as 60 lecture and seminar rooms. The facilities of the university in addition have a 200-seat dining hall and two dormitories for boarding students. The new library is still under construction which, when completed, will be one of the largest in Romania.
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The University of Craiova is a university located in Craiova, Romania. It is an institution of higher education of complex integration, founded in... 1947, with four faculties in the beginning, it has developed continuously, the number of specialization's increasing and today it meets the standards of a high quality academic instruction. It is one of the most advanced universities in Romania, including short-term as well as long-term teaching programs, post-graduate studies in more than 30 fields and 90 specialization's . The number of the teaching staff and students places the University of Craiova among the five largest universities in Romania . It comprises 17 faculties and 2 colleges, offering candidates training in fields of higher education. The University of Craiova was founded on 25 April 1947, comprising four faculties: Human Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, Economical Science, and Agronomy. During the 1948 reformation of education, it includes two additional faculties: Agriculture and Agricultural Machines. In 1951, the institute of Electromechanics started to work.
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The Lower Danube University is a public university located in Galaţi, Romania. It was founded in 1974. The University of Galaţi, as it was... named at first, was founded in July, 1974 by merging the Polytechnical Institute and the College of Education. The Polytechnical Institute of Galaţi had at its origins the Naval and Mechanical Engineering Institute which has been founded in 1951. In 1953, the Institute of Fish Breeding and Fishing Technology located in the city of Constanţa merged with the Naval Institute of Galaţi under the name of Technical Institute of Galaţi. In 1955, the Institute for Food Industry of Bucharest was also transferred at Galaţi. This higher education institutions was to become in 1957 the Polytechnical Institute of Galaţi. The College of Education, founded in 1959 consisted of five faculties: Languages, Mathematics, Physics-Chemistry, Natural Sciences and Sports. The two higher education institutions, the Polytechnical Institute and the College of Education, merged in 1974 and formed the University of Galaţi.
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Sebastian Stan is a Romanian-born American actor. He is best known for playing Prince Jack Benjamin on the television drama Kings and Carter Baizen... on Gossip Girl. Stan was born in the Romanian city of Constanţa. At age 8, he and his mother moved to Vienna, where she was employed as a pianist. Four years later , his mother moved with him to Rockland County, New York after she married the headmaster of an American private school. During his years at the Rockland Country Day School, he starred in productions such as Harvey, Cyrano de Bergerac, Little Shop of Horrors, Over Here, and West Side Story. He also attended the Stagedoor Manor summer camp where he was introduced to acting and was cast in many camp productions. It was then that he decided to take acting seriously and began to apply for acting programs at several universities. He was accepted to and attended Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts. This gave him the opportunity to spend a year abroad studying acting at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, England.
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Stella Roman was a Romanian operatic soprano whose career brought her leading roles in Italy and the United States. Stella Roman was born in 1904... in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary . She came from a musical background, and studied singing for eight years before making her concert début in Cluj and then in Bucharest. She then won a scholarship to continue her training in Italy with the great verismo interpreter Giuseppina Baldassare-Tedeschi, of whom she later said: "her style did not really suit me". Roman moved on to study with Hariclea Darclée , and was much happier under her guidance: "she taught me the value of every word and phrase". Her operatic début was, by her own account, at Bologna in 1934 in the role of Maddalena in Andrea Chénier, . She sang Tosca at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples which inaugurated a long partnership with the tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi.
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Steve Holmes , is a Romanian-born German pornographic actor who started his career in 1997. Holmes is a Transylvanian Saxon from Sibiu. In 1968, his... family managed to cross the Turkish border while on holiday in Bulgaria and sought asylum at the German consulate in İstanbul. Since 2002, he has been living and working in Los Angeles and Budapest. He also started to direct porn films in 2003, working for Platinum X Pictures alongside Manuel Ferrara, Brandon Iron and Michael Stefano. The same year he began directing for Evil Angel, where he has produced films including Anal Cum Addicts, Anal POV Sluts, Anal Romance, Cum Guzzlers, Euro Girls Never Say No, Nothing Butt Fun, Pappa Holmes Lil Girls, Sexy Euro Teens, Steve Holmes Perversions, and The Pussy Is Not Enough. He has received 12 awards in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels and Las Vegas, the most prestigious of which were the AVN Awards as "Male Foreign Performer of the Year" in Las Vegas in 2005 and 2006.
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Sabina Carolina Cojocar is a retired international elite artistic gymnast from Romania as well as a singer. She is a world gold medalist with the... team and a five-time medalist at the 2000 Junior European Gymnastics Championships. Cojocar began gymnastics at the age of three years and eight months though, she told her coach she was five. She was afraid that the coach will not accept a gymnast who was only three. A few years later she was accepted into the Junior National Team in Oneşti and after one year she was accepted as a member of the National Team in Deva under the direct guidance of head-coach Octavian Bellu. She made her international debut at the age of fourteen at the 2000 Junior European Championships in Paris, France where she three gold medals: on the all around , on vault and beam and two silver medals: on floor and with the team. She was touted as the new leader of the young Romanian team and quickly drew international attention, appearing on the cover of the June/July 2000 edition of the International Gymnast Magazine.
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Moldova /mɒlˈdoʊvə/, officially the Republic of Moldova is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe located between Romania to the... west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. It declared itself an independent state with the same boundaries as the preceding Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991 as part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A strip of Moldova's internationally recognized territory on the east bank of the river Dniester has been under the de facto control of the breakaway government of Transnistria since 1990. The nation is a parliamentary republic with a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. Moldova is a member state of the United Nations, Council of Europe, WTO, OSCE, GUAM, CIS, BSEC and other international organizations. Moldova currently aspires to join the European Union, and has implemented the first three-year Action Plan within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy . The name "Moldova" is derived from the Moldova River; the valley of this river was a political center when the Principality of Moldavia was founded in 1359.
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Hungary /ˈhʌŋɡəri/ is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by... Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The capital and largest city is Budapest. Hungary is a member of the European Union, NATO, the OECD, the Visegrád Group, and is a Schengen state. The official language is Hungarian, also known as Magyar, which is part of the Finno-Ugric group and is the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language in Europe. Following a Celtic and a Roman period, the foundation of Hungary was laid in the late 9th century by the Hungarian ruler Árpád, whose great-grandson Saint Stephen I was crowned with a crown sent by the pope from Rome in 1000 AD. The Kingdom of Hungary lasted for 946 years, and at various points was regarded as one of the cultural centres of the Western world.
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Bulgaria /bʌlˈɡɛəriə/ , officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a parliamentary republic in Southeast Europe. It... borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east. Bulgaria is a very mountainous country due to its location in the Balkan peninsula. With a territory of 110,994 square kilometres , Bulgaria ranks as the 14th-largest country in Europe. Prehistoric cultures began developing on Bulgarian lands during the Neolithic period. Its ancient history has been marked by the presence of the Thracians, and later by the Greeks and Romans. The emergence of a unified Bulgarian ethnicity and state dates back to the 7th century and the First Bulgarian Empire, which functioned as a cultural hub for Slavic peoples and spread over most of the Balkans during the Middle Ages. With the downfall of the Second Bulgarian Empire in 1396, its territories came under Ottoman rule for nearly five hundred years. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 resulted in the Third Bulgarian State, recognised in 1908.
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Serbia /ˈsɜrbiə/, officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast... Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans. Serbia borders Hungary to the north; Romania and Bulgaria to the east; the Republic of Macedonia to the south; and Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro to the west; additionally, it borders Albania through Kosovo, whose status as part of Serbia is disputed. The country has just over 7.1 million inhabitants, with its capital, Belgrade, being among the largest cities in Southeast Europe. After the arrival of the Serbs in the Balkans in the 7th century, several medieval states were formed, which evolved into the Serbian Empire in the 14th century. By the 16th century, Serbia was conquered and occupied by the Ottoman Empire, at times interrupted by the Habsburgs.
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