Press Review

There was more flood misery for the residents of north and west Bohemia this weekend, as swollen rivers in the region burst their banks. MLADA FRONTA DNES carries a front-page photo of the church and cemetery of St George in the village of Doubravce, transformed into an island surrounded by a sea of muddy brown water. Worse flooding was only averted when temperatures suddenly plunged below zero over the weekend.

MLADA FRONTA DNES accuses Jaroslav Bures, the ruling Social Democrats' official candidate for president, of lying about his past today. Mr Bures said recently that during the Communist regime he helped someone who signed the Charter 77 human rights petition. But MLADA FRONTA DNES has picked the story to pieces.

Initially Mr Bures claimed that as a judge during the Communist regime he helped an employee of Czechoslovak Radio who was being threatened with dismissal after signing Charter 77. Mr Bures says he threw the case out of court, and the dissident - a man called Heger - kept his job. The problem, says MLADA FRONTA DNES, is that no-one called Heger ever worked for Czechoslovak Radio. And a second problem, it writes, is that by 1977 there weren't any dissidents left at the station. They'd all been thrown out after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion.

The paper says that when they pointed this out to Mr Bures, he suddenly changed his story, saying he'd got his facts mixed up. The man didn't work for Czechoslovak Radio, he said, but for the Orbis publishing house. But Orbis, writes MLADA FRONTA DNES, produced nothing but Communist propaganda, and was staffed solely by secret police agents. So who is this mysterious Heger? Nobody knows, says the paper.

A story now for all those people who like big aggressive dogs - PRAVO reports today on the latest horrifying attack on two innocent passers-by. In a scene which will be wearily familiar to those of you who follow Czech news, a woman and her 12-year-old son are recovering in hospital after being attacked by a Doberman and a Rottweiler as they were walking along the road.

The boy will spend the next six months in hospital recovering from his injuries, which include a broken leg and deep flesh wounds. The dogs broke down the gate of the house and attacked the pair as they were returning home from visiting relatives. PRAVO says the dogs' owner has been charged with grievous bodily harm, and faces up to five years in prison.

A gang of bank robbers in the picturesque South Bohemian town of Cesky Krumlov ended up with egg on their faces on Saturday night, writes LIDOVE NOVINY. Rather than risk trying to rob the local bank in broad daylight, they had a brainwave - why don't we wait until night, they thought, steal the entire cash machine, and bundle it into the back of a car? Unfortunately, says LIDOVE NOVINY, the robbery did not go quite to plan.

The gang, wearing balaclavas, managed to force their way into the bank and somehow levered the machine out of the wall. They succeeded in getting the bank machine into the boot of a waiting Opel Kadett, but at that moment a police patrol happened to walk round the corner. The gang, says the paper, jumped into the car and attempted to make a speedy getaway. The bank machine promptly fell out of the back of the car and onto the road. In the words of the local police spokesman "the gang appear to have underestimated the weight of the machine." They did, however, manage to get away.