Moldova liberă

Ever since like 2nd grade (I was weird), I've had this odd fascination with the Soviet republics--now countries. This interest was fomented recently when I had a roommate from Moldova. I told her that I'd use a pseudonym in the post to protect her identity, so we're gonna call her Queen Latifah.
Anyway, the elections in Moldova were a couple of weeks back and the Communist president didn't want to give up his term-limited position, so they stuffed the ballots using the names of 300,000 dead people. Thus Vladimir Voronin remains president. His name would be Vladimir.

There've been peaceful protests, even though the government has been sending goons in to try to start riots, and Russia is trying desperately to spread lies about the situation.

The crazy thing about all of this? The protests have been organized in large part by using Twitter. If you search PMAN, you'll find all of these links about the situation. The gov't cut off Facebook access in the country because they were using that, too.

I don't know how it's going to end, but hopefully with a legal, democratic government.
Queen Latifah tells me stories of the protests and gives me updates. It's a crazy, uphill battle, but I think it's amazing what the protesters are doing and what they're risking.


And as a crazy sidenote, if Spanish Fork were in Moldova, it'd be the 7th or 8th largest city in the nation.