News

The Health Ministry has said around a dozen seriously ill Iraqi children will receive medical treatment in the Czech Republic. The first three patients will arrive on August 7th and will be admitted to Prague's Motol Hospital. A spokeswoman said the hospital was ready to admit as many children as necessary. The treatment will be paid for by the Czech government. The children are suffering from a number of illnesses including heart conditions.

Bailiffs have seized assets belonging to the Fischer travel agency, which went into forced administration last week. Bailiffs seized the company's Prague headquarters, a branch office in Ostrava and also Vaclav Fischer's private villa. Mr Fischer, until recently a senator, built up the company into the country's most successful travel agencies, with its own charter airline. However the company has been in difficulty for some time, and according to media reports owes Czech Airlines, the Czech Airport Authority and Komercni Banka more than 15 million dollars.

The district court in Usti nad Orlici, East Bohemia, where the descendant of a noble family Franz Ulrich Kinski won four property feuds, has cancelled two scheduled hearings, Mr Kinsky's lawyer told journalists on Friday, adding that the judge had passed the case to the Constitutional Court. Since 2001, Mr Kinsky has filed a total of 157 lawsuits, seeking the recognition of his ownership of large amount of property. Franz Ulrich Kinsky is the descendant of a noble family whose property was confiscated after World War Two on the basis of the so-called Benes decrees, which legalised the confiscation of the property of those who collaborated with the Nazi occupation. In order to prevent Czech courts from passing contradictory verdicts in Mr Kinsky's cases, politicians have called on the Supreme Court to issue a unifying attitude. The Court is to produce it by the end of August.

Czech power producer CEZ said on Friday it would shut down for almost a month the first of two reactors at its nuclear power plant Temelin for planned maintenance work. The shutdown will last from August 2 to August 29. CEZ, which covers 60 percent of the domestic market and claims to be Europe's second biggest electricity exporter, operates two 1,000 megawatt reactors at Temelin, some 60 km north of the Austrian border. Opponents, mainly in the nuclear-free Austria say Temelin's mixture of Soviet design and Western operating technology poses a risk to safety; Temelin's operator CEZ says the plant is safe.