Want to see what happens to a country that has spent decades tolerating rampant corruption, stifling democracy, building up a military-police state, demonizing foreigners and ethnic minorities, and pitting citizen against citizen?

Note: All of the following happened in Romania during the first two weeks of January 2020.

• High levels of toxic substances were found in a school after 17 children were hospitalized.
• A tram in the capital derailed and nobody knows why.
• A hospital in Bucharest was fined 63,000 lei ($15,000) after employees were caught “washing” the walls with a dirty mop.
• The government announced that all citizens age 12 and older will be required to carry an ID card with a built-in RFID chip starting in 2021.
• A 14-year-old girl who “tried to steal” some pants from a store was stripped to her underwear, had insults written on her face with a marker, and thrown into the street by the store’s employees.
• Children are being forced to remove their shoes before entering their school so as not to “damage” the parquet flooring. The school said the measure was justified because the kids were tracking in feces after visiting the outdoor latrine (this is one of the 2,355 schools in Romania that have no running water).
• A shepherd sics his dogs on a stray dog, causing the dog’s violent death. The neighbors say that the man regularly “patrols” the area looking for stray dogs to kill.
• The mayor of Targu-Mures wants the government to sterilize gypsies or, at least, decide which of them are “allowed” to have children.
• A 23-year-old man was shot in Iasi by his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend.
• A respected journalist died and her body lay rotting for days in the house before neighbors discovered it.
• A thief stole a wallet and was caught when he tried to cash in the victim’s winning lottery ticket (prize money: 666 lei).
• The Minister of the Interior personally intervened to stop a police officer from killing himself.
• A bomb threat was called into the Ramnicu Valcea mall.
• Three Libyan refugees were arrested on a train because they “could not justify their presence” there.
• The Interior Minister wants to put an armed cop in every school in Romania.
• A 7-year-old girl was beaten, stripped of her clothing, and thrown out of the house into the January cold by her own mother.
• After raping more than a dozen patients (including at least one child), a former medical worker was freed from prison after serving just three years.
• A man in Sibiu ran over and killed a bear.
• A 44-year-old man in Bucharest hung a dog (to its death) from a gas pipe.
• Incompetence led to hundreds of animals burning to death at a Buzau animal shelter.
• A man went into a hospital in Piatra Neamt and murdered his wife with a knife.
• A 6-year-old-child was traumatized after witnessing a dog getting shot (to death) by the 69-year-old driver of a car who had hit the animal.
• A man in Vrancea hung a dog (to death) in order to “get revenge” on his girlfriend.
• A 76-year-old man from Braila murdered his son-in-law and then set the body on fire.
• Patients in a hospital in Calarasi were served food scraps, including rotten meat and stale bread soaked in water.
• The girlfriend of a man in Bihor, with help from her family, killed the man and then tried to dissolve his body in caustic soda.
• A Bucharest taxi driver was filmed beating the shit out of a passerby.
• An NGO managed to save just 250 out of a total of 14,600 sheep who suffocated to death aboard a Romanian ship.
• Police officers and other employees of the Interior Ministry are going to get a substantial pay raise (UK: rise) this year.
• A 75-year-old man murdered his girlfriend and then threw her dead body over the fence into a cemetery.
• Former Finance minister Daniel Chitoiu killed two people in a traffic accident.
• Six dogs were shot (to death) and their bodies left lying in a field in Suceava.
• Medical incompetence in Bucharest led to a woman being set on fire (and killed) while she was being operated on. Later, investigators found a SECOND patient who had also been set on fire in the same hospital. Other doctors at the hospital went on strike after the doctor responsible was suspended.
• A 13-year-old girl received over 700 threats from people wanting to either kill or rape her.
• Employees working at public hospitals were told that they will be will be fired if they talk to the press.
• The Labor Minister announces that her ministry has 150,000 surplus employees.
• A pregnant woman stabbed her boyfriend (and the father of her unborn child) to death because he “wanted to go to a party.”
• A partially undressed dead woman was found in a field in Iasi.
• A pediatrician in a Satu Mare hospital made violent threats to a 2-year-old patient.
• A man was stabbed in the back by an unknown assailant while celebrating New Year’s in the central square of Targu-Jiu.
• During an Orthodox religious ceremony, an unknown man stole a large cross out of a woman’s hands and then threw it into the Black Sea.
• During a New Year’s party in Baia Mare, partygoers at a hotel began fighting one another, leaving three hospitalized.
• A woman in Galati hired three men to kill her husband and “make it look like an accident.”
• A group of men in Satu Mare put a lit firework in a dog’s mouth “for fun”. The dog’s mouth was blown off, but the animal survived after undergoing hours of emergency surgery.
• A 64-year-old landlord in Bucharest was hospitalized after being beat up by his tenants.
• Two 12-year-old children (one girl and one boy) went Christmas caroling in Vaslui and then bought some cognac with the money they’d been given as “tips”. Both children were later hospitalized after falling into an alcoholic coma, their motionless bodies discovered lying on the street by a passerby.
• So many rats live in the Constanta regional hospital that a ceiling collapsed due to the combined weight of the cats hunting them.
• A 23-year-old man in Vrancea stabbed his own brother, seriously injuring him.
• A 37-year-old man in Oradea was hospitalized after one of the shells in his (highly illegal) stockpile of WW2-era munitions exploded.
• Former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, previously convicted on corruption charges, says he will sue (current) President Klaus Iohannis, who was also previously convicted on corruption charges, for “withdrawing” Nastase’s many state honors.

I also counted at least nine serious traffic accidents involving ambulances.

Happy New Year, Romania!