News

Thirty-four Czech citizens have died in foreign countries since the beginning of this year's summer holiday season, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson told the Czech News Agency on Monday. Most of them - nine - died in Croatia, which is the most popular destinations for Czech tourists. The death count includes three travellers who died in an air crash in Cambodia as well as several Czech mountaineers who lost their lives in the mountains of Slovakia, Russia and Austria. Last year, a total of 394 Czechs died abroad.

Another village on the edge of the Brdy military district in west Bohemia, which is the site of a proposed US radar base, has voted against having the facility in the region. Over ninety seven percent of the village's inhabitants who cast their votes said the municipal authorities should do all in their power to prevent the base from being built. The results of the referendum have no legal bearing on any decision taken by the Czech government.

Several municipalities in the Brdy region have already expressed their opposition to the proposed radar facility, which is meant to be part of a new US missile defence shield in Europe. Although opinion polls have shown that as many as two thirds of Czechs are against building the base in this country, the idea has been supported by most of the parties in the centre-right coalition government. The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, has repeatedly called for a referendum on the issue.

A spokesman for the Czech fire brigade has announced that the Czech Republic is to send special fire-fighting equipment worth around one million Czech crowns (or around 50,000 US dollars) as humanitarian aid to Albania, which has recently been struggling to deal with extensive forest fires that have been exacerbated by the hot weather affecting southern Europe. Earlier in the week the country sent similar aid to Macedonia, which has also been hit by forest fires.

Czech lawyer Zdenek Altner has reacted angrily to a decision by the Social Democrat Party to file a libel suit against him and to also file a complaint with the Czech Bar Association. Writing on his own website, Mr Altner said that the Social Democrats were only taking this step because they thought they still had enough influence with the police and the justice authorities in this country to be able to bully and harass him.

Social Democrat leader Jiri Paroubek told reporters on Saturday that the decision to sue Mr Altner was in reaction to his claims in the media that the party was trying to destroy him and had blackmailed him. Mr Altner has been suing the Social Democrats for billions of Czech crowns, which he says is owed to him for representing the Social Democrats in a dispute over the ownership of the party's Prague headquarters in 2000.