News

A man from Brno has been accused of virtually enslaving five elderly women and forcing them to carry out hard physical work, police in the city said. Jiří Adam, who is 74, says he is a leader in a sect called the Holy Grail Movement. He is accused of using his role as sect-leader to mistreat the women, several of whom lived with him and his wife in a villa in the Moravian capital. His alleged victims reportedly first came into contact with him when he conducted séances, but fell under his influence when they became part of his household. The women transferred their property to his name and gave him their pension money. Neighbours told the police the women, who were malnourished, were forced to work on Mr Adam’s extensive property even on Christmas Eve.

The Czech president, Václav Klaus, has described the views on climate change of the three people in the running for the US presidency as sad and tragic. Mr Klaus made the comments in Washington after an event at which he presented the English-language version of his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles. In it he questions the commonly held view that mankind is responsible for global warming. The Czech president said he hoped John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would tone down their current views on climate change if elected to the White House.

The ministers for EU affairs of France, the Czech Republic and Sweden have outlined a road-map of EU policy priorities for the 18-month period during which they will consecutively hold the rotating EU presidency. The seventy-page-long document includes chapters on energy and climate-change, security, labour and social issues. News of the agreement was announced by the Czech Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexander Vondra in Prague, following a meeting with his Swedish and French counterparts. Details of the agreement will not be disclosed until it has been debated by a summit of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on June 16th.

A final resting place has been found for around 4,000 German soldiers who died on Czech soil during World War II, ending a protracted and embarrassing search for a burial place. Germany’s war graves authority signed an agreement for the soldiers’ remains, until now kept in storage, to be buried at a specially arranged graveyard in the West Bohemian town of Cheb. The drawn-out search for an appropriate burial ground started in March 2006 when Czech media uncovered the soldiers’ remains at a disused factory in the northern city of Ustí nad Labem.

It is estimated that around 178,000 German soldiers died in the former Czechoslovakia fighting Soviet forces closing in from the north and east and US forces from the west. Some of the fallen are already buried at 10 war cemeteries dotted across the country.