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.
After spending the Christmas holidays at home, Stefan Gonda arrived at the airport in Poprad in the central European state of Slovakia on Saturday to catch a flight back to Dublin where he's been working for the past four years. The 49-year-old checked his bags in and boarded the plane as he'd done numerous times in the past. That, however, is where normal ends. Slovak security had an idea, a bad idea. They would load explosives into the bags of an unsuspecting traveler to test whether their explosive team dogs could sniff them out. Unknown to him, Gonda would provide the baggage. However, everything went terribly wrong, and the sleepy town of Poprad soon found itself at the center of world attention.
