Magazine

The Prime Minister's wife wows the press with a surprise make-over, the Orient Express passes through Prague, and Czech Television starts shooting a soap opera about hockey! Find out more in Magazine with Daniela Lazarova.

The Czech Republic not only has a new prime minister, it would seem that the prime minister has a new wife. Or rather, a dramatically altered wife. After getting a lot of criticism regarding her appearance Zuzana Paroubkova surprised the media by getting a complete make-over. The woman who said she wanted to give her husband a tranquil and comfortable home environment where he could relax after a hard day's work has realized that the cameras are often turned on her as well. A home maker and caring wife, who teaches and translates from French, Mrs. Paroubkova had no trouble getting involved in charity as befits the PMs wife, but instead of noticing the work she did the media noticed she was wearing a T-shirt and well-worn cardigan on her visit to a children's hospital. Now Mrs. Paroubkova is ready to take them on. "I've acquired a whole new wardrobe - even new jeans for walking the dog," she joked with the press. Asked how her husband had liked the makeover, she said "he was delighted". Despite her new glam look the Prime Minister's wife says she hopes the press will allow her some privacy and that her husband's new post will not disrupt their lives "more than necessary", as she put it.

---

Oetzi, photo: www.ethlife.ethz.ch

An ESP who cooperates with the police and has helped to resolve a number of crimes, has warned against any further manipulation and experiments with the remains of Oetzi the Ice Man. Jiri Vojacek, aged 57, says that there is still a lot of black evil in the body of Oetzi who lived over 5,300 years ago and whose frozen body was found in the Alps by a tourist. Since then six people, who in one way or another, all came into contact with Oetzi have died. ESP Jiri Vojacek believes this is no coincidence and says that the ice man's body should be returned to where it was found. He claims that Oetzi was killed by members of his own tribe whom he failed to cure of an epidemic and that Oetzi's remains contain bacteria which could seriously endanger our civilization. Medical experts say this is rubbish. But Mr. Vojacek maintains that if doctors 'open up' Oetzi's knee as planned tragedy will strike.

---

The human fossil from the Mladec Caves in Moravia, photo: Wolfgang Reichmann

Now onto a friendlier skeleton - fossilized human bones found in the Czech Republic have been dated back some 31,000 years, confirming them as the oldest known examples of Homo sapiens ever found in Europe. The specimens - an upper jaw, teeth and the skull of a female - were found in a cave in Moravia in the 19th century, and debate has raged backwards and forwards as to their age. Now Eva Wild, a researcher at the University of Vienna, and her colleagues have applied a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to analyze carbon isotopes in the dental remains. These isotopes decay at a known speed, thus enabling investigators to calculate the age of a dead organism. Wild's team reported in the British journal Nature recently that the teeth of the Homo sapiens found in Moravia are about 31,000 radio carbon years old, a yardstick that can be somewhat different from calendar years. That estimate concurs with artefacts that have been carbon dated to the same era. The finding is important because it could help solve the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals, a species of hominid that lived in Europe before anatomically modern man showed up. One school of thought suggests that they were wiped out by the smarter Homo sapiens or lost the battle for food and habitat, but a more controversial theory suggests that the two hominid species lived side by side for many thousands of years and may have intermingled, which implies that there could be Neanderthal genes in the human gene pool today.

---

Many detective story enthusiasts turned up to get a glimpse of the legendary Orient Express as it passed through the Czech Republic last week. On its Vienna-Prague-Paris trip the luxury train made a 30 minute stop over in Breclav, enabling onlookers to get a good look at the 16 wagons -the sleeping cars, dining cars and special entertainment cars -which make a trip on the Orient Express a unique experience. The price of your train fare is likewise unforgettable - around seventy thousand crowns.

The Orient Express, made famous by the popular Agatha Christie detective story of the same name, originally travelled between London and Istanbul, but in the late 20th century the Orient Express passed into the ownership of millionaire James Sherwood who turned it into a successful business. It is now known as the Venice-Simplon-Orient Express and makes trips to different parts of Europe. It first passed through the Czech Republic in 1994, nowadays it passes through the country about four times a year.

---

A Czech truck driver who drove into a ditch was found to have eight grams of alcohol in his bloodstream. The police officers who arrived on the scene of the accident said they couldn't believe their eyes when they saw the figure. Doctors agree that with so much alcohol in his bloodstream it is a wonder that the man was not dead -let alone in a condition to drive a car. To reach such an alcohol level a person has to drink 30 to 40 glasses of wine or 15 to 20 pints of beer one after the other. The driver, who was fined for drunk driving just a month ago, insisted he'd only had a couple of beers and said the police should thank him since he's managed to avert an accident by driving into the ditch when he saw an oncoming vehicle.

---

The Czech Republic's victory in the world ice hockey championship is still fresh in people's minds and Czech television hopes that its new soap opera revolving around the world of ice hockey and the private lives of hockey stars will bring them to their TV sets. The idea to bring hockey on stage is not entirely new. In the wake of the Czech national team's victory at the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan in 1998 the Czech national Theatre premiered a most unusual production - the opera Nagano. Reactions to it were mixed, but it got plenty of publicity in the media and was noticed abroad. The new TV series is to have ten episodes and only some of it will take place on the ice rink. The series aims to show hockey stars as real people with their ups and downs, wins and losses. The actors allegedly spent a few months on the ice training and there are rumours that Czech TV is negotiating a guest appearance of the real ice hockey stars.