Word: vaclav
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...theme that reverberated last week across the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. In Serbia a vendetta-minded super-patriot won voter endorsement as leader of Yugoslavia's dominant republic, while in supposedly velvetized Czechoslovakia ethnic jealousies threatened to split the nation. In an emergency appeal, President Vaclav Havel cited freedom's hazards. "The state," he said, "is not endangered from outside, as has happened many times in the past, but from within. We are putting it at risk by our own lack of political culture, of democratic awareness and of mutual understanding...
History keeps its own peculiar rhythms, sometimes rewarding the lowly and punishing the mighty with a brutal speed that leaves spectators gasping. Once imprisoned playwrights suddenly become Presidents (witness Vaclav Havel); dictators suddenly become jailed pariahs (witness Erich Honecker, among others). And sometimes history conspires to undo a leader who had so completely embodied the spirit of the times that she seemed destined to govern forever...
...actress-model who starred in the destruction of Gary Hart's career is getting inadvertent help from a more successful candidate: Vaclav Havel. However, Rice got poor notices for her Virginia performance as a student who offers herself to a professor in the Czech leader's Largo Desolato...
...joke making the rounds in Prague has a group of people, among them Czechoslovak Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, asked to identify an upturned bottle top. All except Klaus give the expected answer. The Minister, who proposes radical reforms that would cut deeply into living standards, pauses only briefly before answering: "It's a pan for frying steak...
While Klaus' plans are less drastic than the wags imply, he has a reputation for toughness. President Vaclav Havel himself has long argued that Klaus' shock therapy is too severe and would produce civil unrest...