Prague

This week, Emily greets her six remaining suitors in Prague. Arie's got a secret Sarah: Emily and Arie ("Speed Racer") have a thrilling one-on-one date strolling through Prague. While kissing in front of picture-perfect scenes and annoying other tourists, Emily worries about Arie's secret. He briefly dated a "Bachelorette" producer (now Emily's friend) several years ago and still hasn't told her. She spends their entire lunch telling him how important honesty is and how they shouldn't keep secrets.

After a long drive from Arizona, prosecutors say, Dmytro Holovko pulled up to a meeting spot on Liberty Road and unloaded hundreds of pounds of marijuana - another successful shipment for a drug ring accused of using Baltimore as a hub in a distribution network that brought in $1 million a month. Holovko, a 54-year-old Czech national, stands accused of being a courier for the violent organization, in a case that brought a consul from the Czech Embassy to a federal courtroom in Baltimore on Tuesday amid complaints about the defendant's court-appointed lawyer.

My husband and I are traveling to Prague in the Czech Republic this year and want to find a hotel room at a maximum rate of $80 to $90 per night. Any suggestions? Given your budget, it might be difficult to find a hotel in Old Town or Mala Strana, desirable areas in the Prague 1 district. But if you expand your search a bit, you should find affordable lodging close to a subway or tram stop. Although they are a little more than you want to pay, consider Hotel Ibis (karlin.hotel ibis.cz)

This week, Emily greets her six remaining suitors in Prague. Arie's got a secret Sarah: Emily and Arie ("Speed Racer") have a thrilling one-on-one date strolling through Prague. While kissing in front of picture-perfect scenes and annoying other tourists, Emily worries about Arie's secret. He briefly dated a "Bachelorette" producer (now Emily's friend) several years ago and still hasn't told her. She spends their entire lunch telling him how important honesty is and how they shouldn't keep secrets.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- In 40-foot containers shipped from Baltimore's harbor, the American dream house has crossed the Atlantic and is quickly changing the way some Czech homeowners think of their castles.USA Builders, based in Potomac, Md., is one of two companies exporting the U.S.-style subdivision beam-by-beam, doorknob-by-doorknob to the Czech Republic.More than 30 homes have been sold to Prague's wealthiest new capitalists, and builders are confident that the 140 planned will only begin to satisfy a growing lust for the American lifestyle.

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia -- The Philadelphia Orchestra's concert here last night produced an explosive emotional outburst at the end that caught the musicians by surprise. Playing its first concert ever in Prague, the ensemble had programmed Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, "Eroica," and followed with a Russian work.The concert, part of the orchestra's current European tour, had been programmed when Czechoslovakia was still a Communist country. No one could have predicted what Beethoven's music would mean in a nation that has since turned its government upside down, whose people have chosen freedom and now grope toward some solid footing as a republic.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- The Johns Hopkins baseball team has returned home from a triumphant road trip to the heart of Europe, where it competed in the 14th Prague Baseball Week tournament.Although the Blue Jays did not take home the title, finishing third with a 4-2 record, they agreed that it was a no-lose tournament.Hopkins coach Robert Babb said his players have plenty of time to play ball, but maybe only one chance to visit Prague. From all accounts, the team made the most of it."It's been great," said Babb.

For filmmakers contemplating gorgeous Prague in the Czech Republic as a location, the message from Tom Cruise is: Don't bother.Mr. Cruise, on his first outing as a producer -- a movie version of "Mission Impossible," in which he stars -- recently ended three weeks of shooting in Prague believing he'd been unfairly overcharged for a location site. "At one point we were told, 'If you don't sign the papers by 4 p.m., you don't get the locale,' " said Katherine Orloff, the movie's publicity agent.

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia -- Bell Atlantic and US West are expected to sign a $60 million deal with Czechoslovakia next week to build and operate a cellular mobile telephone network, it has been learned.The contract would give the two U.S. regional phone companies a combined 49 percent share in the joint venture with the Czech government. The agreement is being readied for signature during the President Bush's visit to Prague, which is scheduled for Nov. 17, a senior government official said.

PRAGUE -- Attention, Prague shoppers: Kmart has arrived.Two years ago, faced with stagnating sales at home, the Michigan-based retailing giant went shopping for a chain of stores in an area that promised to show strong growth in coming years. The company came home with Prague's Maj and 12 other department stores in the Czech Republic and Slovakia -- and shopping here will never be the same.In years past, about the only thing the Maj had in sufficient abundance to warrant a Kmart Blue Light Special was its unfriendly service.

Each week The Sun's  John McIntyre  presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: DEFENESTRATE We are two days away from the anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague. On May 23, 1618, insurgent Bohemians unceremoniously tossed imperial commissioners out the window of Hradcany Castle in Prague, touching off the Thirty Years' War. It was actually the second defenestration of Prague; in the first, in 1419, Hussites killed members of the city council.

Michael G. Rokos has traveled thousands of miles to pay homage to his American and Czech heritage and to the 28th U.S. president, who befriended his family nearly a century ago. The lifelong Baltimorean will reconnect with cousins in the Czech Republic and gather with them in Prague Wednesday for a ceremony that pays tribute to two cultures and one American leader. They will stand on Wilson Street, in front of Wilson Train Station, and rededicate a monument to Woodrow Wilson, who championed the Czech quest for independence early in the 20th Century.

MOSCOW -- On the eve of the annual Group of Eight summit that opens today in Germany, President Bush offered his most strident rebuke to date of his Russian counterpart, saying that Russia has "derailed" democratic reforms, and that the result had "troubling implications" for democracy. Bush's blunt comments in the Czech Republic added to the escalating rhetoric that has characterized increasingly frayed relations between Russia and the West in recent days. And they set the stage for potentially prickly talks between Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin at a time when diplomatic friction has infected the two leaders' widely publicized friendship.

My husband and I are traveling to Prague in the Czech Republic this year and want to find a hotel room at a maximum rate of $80 to $90 per night. Any suggestions? Given your budget, it might be difficult to find a hotel in Old Town or Mala Strana, desirable areas in the Prague 1 district. But if you expand your search a bit, you should find affordable lodging close to a subway or tram stop. Although they are a little more than you want to pay, consider Hotel Ibis (karlin.hotel ibis.cz)

Teeny flakes of snow were dropping steadily in Prague at the beginning of my winter journey to Europe. Snow is a blessing for winter sports, but I was trying to tour like a summer nomad, visiting parks and museums and churches and restaurants. In the late Prague afternoon, I walked outside my hotel, into a fine white cloud. My friends had told me I was bonkers for touring Europe the first week of March. They were vacationing in places where the sun was actually able to warm something - the Caribbean Sea, for instance.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Deep in the Klanovice forest just outside Prague in the heart of mushroom-mad Slavic Europe, Vaclav Halek stands above a small cluster of mushrooms, pen poised over a sheet of music paper. Within seconds he is scribbling musical notes, stopping only to chuckle delightedly, his hand waving in the air as if conducting an orchestra. Ten minutes later he has completed a musical score, one he insists he hears from the Tubaria hiemalis below. Half a mile along, it's the same again as Halek gently clears leaves from around his chosen specimen, stands back and calmly waits.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- President Clinton, on the second leg of his European tour, arrived in this enchanting city of castles, 15th-century bridges and cobblestone streets last night and enjoyed himself before taking on the serious business of reassuring nations that have known almost nothing but strife in this century.Setting down in the nation whose deliverance to Germany in 1938 came to epitomize wrongheaded appeasement of the Nazis, the President left behind a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Brussels, Belgium, where he orchestrated a go-slow policy on admitting the Czechs and other former Warsaw Pact nations into the Western alliance.

It's a new development of luxury homes, where the properties will have leaded-glass front doors, solid-oak kitchen cabinets, first-rate appliances, two fireplaces and two-car garages.Homes for the U.S. market?Hardly.The houses are destined for Prague in the new Czech Republic, where nouveau riche families are expected to pay the equivalent of $1 million for the privilege of purchasing a 2,400-square-foot property.A father-son business team from Rockville are shipping the first containers of building supplies for their new subdivision through the port of Baltimore.

THE TRUE MEANING of the word Bohemia is, according to American Heritage College dictionary, a historical region and former kingdom of present-day Czech Republic established between the first and fifth centuries. Most people today know its colloquial meaning, which is a community of people with artistic or literary tastes with unconventional manners and mores. To the people of Cecil County, though, the word Bohemia has a more local resonance because it commonly is known as the land that Dutch emigre Augustine Herrman established and named in 1661.

A Memorable Place Medieval history in underground Prague By Danielle Barbour SPECIAL TO THE SUN Prague's history rises sharply over the Vltava River in the shape of its ancient castle and Gothic cathedral. The church's spires dominate the city skyline and beckon visitors up countless stairs for a closer look. Yet on my second trip to the "Golden City," I resisted the cathedral one rainy morning in search of drier shelter. I dashed over slippery cobblestones and handed over 200 Czech crowns for a cheap black umbrella.