Press Review

All the papers today lead with news that police have caught the alleged "cyanide blackmailer" - a thirty-year-old man accused of threatening to poison hospital food with cyanide. LIDOVE NOVINY not only publishes the suspect's full name, but also carries a front-page photo of his house near Benesov. So much for the concept of innocent until proven guilty...

All the papers today lead with news that police have caught the alleged "cyanide blackmailer" - a thirty-year-old man accused of threatening to poison hospital food with cyanide.

Meanwhile Communist Party deputy chairman Miloslav Ransdorf is getting a rather mixed reception on his current visit to the United States. As LIDOVE NOVINY reports, Mr Ransdorf was ejected from a Czech music festival in New York on Saturday night after Czech émigrés learned he was in the audience. Mr Ransdorf had turned up for a concert by the Czech group Cechomor at the city's Bohemian Hall, when organisers announced his presence in the auditorium.

"As soon as they said Ransdorf was in the audience the crowd started booing," a Czech Radio correspondent told LIDOVE NOVINY. "The organisers went over to him and pointed out that about half of the crowd were Czechs who were forced to flee the country by the Communists," he went on. "Then they asked him to leave." Mr Ransdorf moved on to another Czech venue, a restaurant called Zlata Praha.

Back home in the Czech Republic, and LIDOVE NOVINY covers Saturday's 10km fun run in East Bohemia, which also drew some VIP guests, this time rather more welcome than Mr Ransdorf. They were the Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla and his Slovak counterpart Mikulas Dzurinda, both keen long-distance runners. The two men chose a symbolic finish to the race: crossing the finishing line hand-in-hand.

It was a good race for Mr Spidla, says LIDOVE NOVINY - he improved his personal record by four minutes. The paper shows the two men enjoying a well-earned beer after finishing the race, although they almost never made it to the starting line: neither prime minister had any cash on them to pay the registration fee, and were only saved by the chief organiser who lent them 500 crowns each.

MLADA FRONTA DNES looks at Saturday's attempt by the commercial TV station Nova to measure the nation's IQ. The station chose teams representing different social groups, and gave them 81 standard intelligence tests compiled by a representative of MENSA. The result, claims Nova: teachers - with an average IQ of 125 - are more intelligent than policemen, celebrities and blondes.

At the same time Nova also tested around 90,000 people over the Internet, and found that men are cleverer than women, right-handed people have higher IQs than left-handed people, and non-smokers have more brains than smokers. But MLADA FRONTA DNES is far from impressed with the survey: Nova might have used standard IQ tests, says the paper, but the methodology tells us nothing about how intelligent we - as a nation - really are.

And finally in the paper's Prague section MLADA FRONTA DNES reports on a bizarre event that took place in Prague this weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of the conquering of Mount Everest. At around 100 metres, Prague's Petrin hill is somewhat less intimidating than Everest - 8,848 metres - but not if you run up and down it 82 times. That's just what a group of forty people did this weekend, recreating a similar event 20 years ago.

A total of 40 people set off for the summit on Saturday morning, says MLADA FRONTA DNES, and 29 were still running up and down the hill 30 hours later. "We chose the method of gradual conquest," says organiser Milan Suchy. "Just like they do in the mountains. We even had a base camp where people could recover on their way to the peak."