Press Review

Besides Tuesday's vote of confidence won in the House of Deputies by Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla's government, most of the papers today carry articles with unpleasant news. On the international front, it is the United States pushing for war against Iraq, and domestically, an analysis of how Czechs die, the investigation into the fatal coach crash and another attempt at self-immolation making the headlines.

MLADA FRONTA DNES follows up on news covered by some of the Czech TV stations on Tuesday, involving one of the biggest hypermarket chains in the country. Besides customers, bailiffs also made their way to Tesco on Tuesday afternoon to confiscate valuable goods in reaction to Tesco allegedly owing an unnamed entrepreneur eighty million crowns. The bailiffs tried to take goods but were opposed by the store's security guards. The Prague police had to be called in to settle the dispute. The paper quotes a spokesman for the supermarket chain who says the company was not aware of any outstanding debt.

The driver of the coach that crashed over the weekend, killing 19 and injuring 34, could face up to ten years in prison. All of the papers report that results of the ongoing investigation into the cause of the accident point to the driver as no technical fault has been detected. On a more pleasant note, PRAVO writes that an eighteen year old girl, who was originally presumed to have died in the accident as her name had mistakenly got on the official list of victims, was found to be alive and well. Anna Handrychova is still in hospital with injuries and tells the paper that she is now being bombarded with phone calls from relieved friends and family. She sees her "waking from the dead" to be a sign of long life.

And HOSPODARSKE NOVINY warns that the Czech Republic is being flooded with car wrecks from Germany. A number of second-hand car dealerships in Germany solve their problems of lack of space with sell-offs to Czech customers. Last year alone, 39 thousand cars that have either been wrecked in accidents or were old were brought into the Czech Republic. According to the head of the Automobile Industry Association, the trend is becoming a growing problem as the cars are not officially registered and no one knows where they are.

MLADA FRONTA DNES reports on the results of a public opinion poll that was conducted by the Czech Centre for Public Opinion Research last month. According to the poll, eight out of ten non-Roma Czechs claim it is difficult to live alongside Romanies, and a quarter of the population says that relations with the Roma are bad. The poll suggests that the overall attitude towards the Roma community has not changed in the past few years.

The polling centre's Jan Cervenka tells the paper that for a short while at the end of the 1990's, a campaign against racism, which displayed billboards of members of the Roma community as hockey players or in other respectable professions, helped to make Czechs more accepting of the minority group. According to the paper, the opinion poll comes just in time as the Czech government aims to discuss the Roma community's standard of living and their integration into the rest of society during its session on Wednesday.

PRAVO carries a dramatic report on a failed attempt at self immolation. A 21 year old mentally ill man was flown to a hospital in Prague with 50% of his body burned after he had tried to set himself alight. He was lucky enough to be saved by his mother who put him under the shower and immediately called an ambulance. The boy is now in critical condition and police suspect that he got the idea of setting himself on fire from last week's publicised case when a nineteen-year old student committed suicide in this way on Prague's Wenceslas Square, writes PRAVO.

LIDOVE NOVINY carries an article analysing in what conditions Czechs die in hospitals and comes to the conclusion that, when compared to other countries, it is far from respectable. The paper gives two examples where hospitals failed to carry out the wishes of patients who wanted to be transferred to private rooms to spend the last few moments in a peaceful environment, only surrounded by their families. With hospital staff unwilling to acknowledge the rights of their dying patients, this country needs a law that will guarantee every person the right to leave this world in a respectable way, the paper writes.