News

Seventeen Dutch students were hospitalised in Germany having been poisoned by food they were served during a class trip to the Czech Republic, a police official from the German town of Hof has said. The Dutch school-group were returning home after a trip to the Krkonoše Mountains in the north of the Czech Republic when 17 members of the group fell so ill they had to be hospitalized in a German town on the way. According to local police, the students may have been poisoned by a meal they ate in the Czech town of Mšeno on Friday evening before setting off. Police refused to divulge the age of the students affected, nor the name of the restaurant in question. All of those hospitalized have now been discharged.

The lower house of Parliament on Friday approved an anti-crisis package that includes a scrap incentive to boost car sales, faster tax write-offs and more generous unemployment and child benefits. The car scrap incentive would be either 30,000 or 60,000 crowns for a vehicle older than ten years depending on whether the owner acquired an ordinary car or an environmentally friendly vehicle. The bill is a compromise agreement between the two strongest parties in Parliament, the Civic and Social Democrats, and should have no problems passing through the Senate.

President Klaus has rejected allegations that he had contributed to the fall of former prime minister Topolánek’s centre right government, which was toppled in a vote of no-confidence in mid-March. In an interview for Friday’s Lidové noviny Mr. Klaus said that the main reason for the government’s fall was infighting within all three ruling parties which weakened the government in the lower house. He said it had been folly on the part of Green Party leader Martin Bursík to expel two deputies from the party at a time when the governing coalition no longer had a majority in the lower house. Shortly after his government was toppled, the former prime minister Mirek Topolánek accused President Klaus, Prague mayor Pavel Bem and rivals within his own Civic Democratic Party of having orchestrated the fall.

The mayor of Chomutov, Ivana Řápkova, has filed a libel suit against the minister for minorities and human rights Michael Kocáb. The mayor claims that the minister is damaging her reputation by blaming her for the town’s problems with the Romany minority. According to an analysis which the minister commissioned, the town hall should have dealt with Romany rent-defaulters systematically instead of cracking down on them with full force earlier this year and ordering bailiffs to confiscate their welfare and child support subsidies. The mayor says that her decision was not-racially motivated and that the town hall had been struggling to reach agreement with these particular rent-defaulters for years.