VACLAV HAVEL

Czech arts collector and patron Meda Mladkova has died.

As she pressed the Clinton administration into action against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic over war crimes in the Balkans, Madeleine Albright would harken back to her own childhood as a refugee from Czechoslovakia who fled the Nazis in war-torn Europe.

Czech travel writer Miroslav Zikmund has died at age 102.

Petr Uhl, a Czech journalist who was one of the country's leading communist-era dissidents and human rights activists, has died at 80.

Having managed to pass a temporary extension of the debt ceiling with some Republican help, Washington Democrats are again facing a roadblock - the stubborn divisions within their own caucus. As Doug McKelway reports, even their loyal allies in media are beginning to acknowledge that much deeper troubles lie ahead for Democrats unless the party can unite its disparate factions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree allowing the country to limit the number of Russians employed at embassies of countries determined to be unfriendly, or to ban their employment entirely.

(AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)WARSAW – Central European leaders pushed Wednesday for faster deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines from every reliable manufacturer to speed up inoculations which they said is the way to conquer the pandemic and jump-start Europe’s economic recovery. The leaders of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland said they support purchasing vaccines from manufacturers regardless of “geopolitics” provided they are safe and effective. Hungary is the European Union's first and so far only member state to administer Russia's Sputnik V vaccine without waiting for approval from the European Medicines Agency. “There is no Eastern or Western vaccine, there is only a good or a bad vaccine,” Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a news conference in Krakow, Poland. European Council President Charles Michel, who attended the celebrations, said EU leaders will discuss next week ways of increasing vaccine production and of speeding up inoculations.

The group, also known as V4, often works out joint positions in international ties, especially within the European Union. Opening the ceremonial meeting, Duda said the V4 group has had a positive role in European and trans-Atlantic ties. “The group is an important, if not the key catalyst of the regional cooperation in all of Central Europe and contributes significantly to the cooperation and political processes regarding the EU and NATO," Duda said. Poland currently holds the group's 12-month rotating presidency, which it will hand over to Hungary on July 1. ___A previous version of this story corrected the spelling of the Slovakia president’s name to Zuzana Caputova, not Zuzanna Czaputova.

PRAGUE Jiri Menzel, a Czech director whose 1966 movie Closely Watched Trains won the Academy Award for the best foreign language film has died. Three years ago, Menzel underwent a brain operation and was kept in an artificially induced coma for several weeks after it. Unlike colleagues such as Milos Forman, Jan Nemec and Ivan Passer, Menzel didnt emigrate after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Closely Watched Trains was his first feature movie. His 1985 comedy My Sweet Little Village was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film.