Bucharest - Romania's Bucharest Stock Exchange halted regular trading Friday for the second time this week, as the massive global sell-off hit Eastern Europe's fastest-growing economy.

Seeking to stem panic selling, exchange officials blocked transactions right at the start of Friday's session and drastically shortened the trading day to 15 minutes, news reports said.

Otherwise, the broad-based BET-C index would have plunged 15 per cent after the latest share plunge on Wall Street and in Asian markets, said Stere Farmache, the exchange's general manager.

Bucharest  - Some 100,000 Romanian civil servants walked off the job Thursday to press for 50 per cent higher pay, the latest sign of wage pressures in the new European Union nation.

The two-hour "warning strike" came after Romania's parliament, facing elections on November 28, recently voted a 50-per-cent raise for teachers. Health-care workers are demanding 60 per cent more pay.

Bucharest - Bucharest's stock e

Bucharest - Romania will press ahead with plans for a national Holocaust memorial, Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu said Monday.

Tariceanu said work would soon commence at the site in the centre of Bucharest, the capital, to commemorate some
400,000 Romanian Jews and Roma killed under a Nazi-allied regime during World War II.

"The Holocaust must not be denied or forgotten, and it must never be repeated," Tariceanu said in a written statement ahead of Romania's October 9 Holocaust memorial day, introduced four years ago.

The memorial is to use a design by Romanian-born sculptor Peter Jacobi, who lives in Germany.

Bucharest - The Romanian government is go to constitutional court over a parliamentary decision to raise the salary of teachers by 50 per cent, Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu said Saturday.

Parliament made the teachers' wage decision in a unanimous vote two months before the election of a new parliament.

In its lawsuit, the government alleges legislators had not specified the financial sources of the salary increases.

The parliamentary decision has triggered an avalanche of wage demands, with 100,000 civil servants as well calling for 50-per-cent wage increases and threatening to strike.

Health care workers have demanded a 60-per-cent salary increase.

Czech energy firm CEZ and Electrabel, a unit of French-based GDF Suez, won contracts to build two coal-fired power plants in Romania, the government said Wednesday.

Each contract is worth up to 400 million euros (590 million dollars), Economy Minister Varujan Vosganian said.

The 400-megawatt units in eastern Romania will be built at two existing power plants in cooperation with state-owned utility Termoelectrica SA.

Electrabel was contracted to build a unit at Borzesti and CEZ was tapped for one at Galati, also the site of Romania's biggest steelworks.