Press Review

All today's papers dedicate a lot of space on their front pages to the package of flood reforms the government approved late on Sunday night. The meeting ended too late for the papers to include all details, but not many differences from the proposed version were expected anyway.

The measures include an increase in VAT from 5 to 7 percent on services and selected goods, which will make food, telecommunications services but also newspapers more expensive, Hospodarske noviny says. On the other hand, the 22 percent VAT levied on most products will be decreased to 21 percent, which will lower the price of clothes, refrigerators and TV sets, the paper writes.

Mlada fronta Dnes features an interview with former Justice Minister Jaroslav Bures under the headline "I want to be the next president". The paper says that beside Senate Chairman Petr Pithart, Mr Bures is the only Czech politician to openly admit he plans to run for the presidential office. When asked what kind of a president he would be, Jaroslav Bures said he would be a predictable president for every day, which he said would be different from Vaclav Havel's type of presidency. Mr Bures also said he would enjoy the role of the supreme commander of the armed forces.

Czech stars have conquered the Kremlin, reads a headline in today's Pravo. A choir of six thousand, women in a trance, flowers everywhere, tears on the cheeks of statesmen - that's how Russian papers describe the triumphant success of Czech singers in the Russian capital. Opera singers Eva Urbanova and Leo Marian Vodicka appeared alongside pop singers Helena Vondrackova and - the biggest attraction - Karel Gott at a sold-out Kremlin Congress Hall on Friday.

All those years after the fall of communism, Karel Gott still has a faithful fan club in Russia, Pravo writes, and his female fans stalked him across Moscow for three days. One of them, Galina Gorbova has been worshipping her hero for 35 years and never missed a single concert he performed in the Soviet Union. "Life would be no good without Karel," says Galina about her idol, who knows how to treat his admirers: for example he addressed them in fluent Russian, Pravo writes.

Pravo continues in its series of articles on the disastrous flooding of Prague's metro. According to the paper, experts investigating the causes and results of the flooding in the system found an ordinary brick wall in a corridor between two lines where there should have been a concrete and iron one. Now they are examining whether the original project was changed during the construction and why. The team say that so far this is the only construction fault they have found in the metro.

Lidove noviny carries a photo of two seals playing at Prague zoo, which reopened to visitors on Saturday, for the first time since the flood ruined a large part of the site, killing dozens of animals. Although the weekend was nice and sunny, only 800 people turned up, according to a zoo spokesman. On June 1st the zoo saw a record of 16,000 visitors.