Listen to the pledge or else. That sums up proposed legislation aimed at stirring up patriotic fervor in the central European state of Slovakia. However, many in Slovakia, used to such arm-twisting under decades of now discredited communism, don't like the idea of patriotism by diktat. Some 1,000 students and teachers protested outside of the presidential palace on Wednesday to appeal to President Ivan Gasparovic not to sign the legislation, already passed by parliament, into law. The protest comes amid percolating tensions between ethnic Slovaks and the country's main ethnic minority, Hungarians.
