Press Review
A variety of faces appear on the front pages of Wednesday's newspapers. Ice hockey player Dominik Hasek "dominates" the dailies; the 38-year-old has just announced he is returning to the NHL and his last club, the Detroit Redwings. Popular skier Katerina Neumannova is also in the news: several papers picture her and her new-born baby daughter.
A new postage stamp bearing the face of President Vaclav Klaus features on page one of LIDOVE NOVINY. It's a six-crown forty-heller stamp, the standard for posting letters and postcards within the Czech Republic. The stamp was issued a full two months after had first been planned: the picture on the original stamp wasn't to the president's liking, so Mr Klaus sent the designers back to the drawing board.
The Oscar-winning Czech-born film director Milos Forman is planning to shoot a new film in Prague, reports LIDOVE NOVINY on its front page. Two decades after he made Amadeus in the Czech capital, Mr Forman is to begin shooting a film called Embers in the city in October. It will star Sean Connery and Winona Ryder.
In the wake of the death of conjoined twin sisters from Iran, the same paper carries a report on the number of such twins born in the Czech Republic. The last Siamese twins in this country were born in Most in 1983 and died three days later, says LIDOVE NOVINY. A doctor tells the daily that the problem can now be detected within seven or eight weeks of conception and in almost all cases the pregnancy is terminated.
There is a great headline on the front page of PRAVO: the state of Czech feet is bad and is steadily deteriorating. So says Vaclav Novotny, the President of the Czech Shoemakers' Association. Between 15 and 17 percent of the nation's children have irreversible feet deformities caused by wearing poor-quality footwear, he says. In the days before widespread imports, when most people wore Czech-made shoes, only five percent had such deformities, says Mr Novotny, who - as I say - is the head of the Czech Shoemakers' Association.
