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City councilors are weighing the possibility of renaming a Prague bridge or part of an embankment street after late President Václav Havel, Mlada fronta Dnes reports. According to the daily, part of Rašínovo nábřeži near where Mr Havel once had an apartment could be renamed in his honour. Councilor Lukáš Manhart told the paper the renaming was a possibility but provided few details. At least one other city councilor expressed support for the idea. Earlier this year Prague’s Ruzyně international airport was renamed after the late president.

New Transport Minister Zbyněk Stanjura has listed as a top priority for alternatives to be found to the Czech Republic’s “overused” major highway, the D1, connecting Bohemia and Moravia. His stressed as an alternative the building of a major road, the R35, as well rail “corridors”. The minister suggested that such a solution made more sense than adding lanes to the D1 and said such projects would help boost the economy. The D1 highway often comes under criticism for damaged routes and surfaces suffering heavy traffic and transport. Minister Stanjura made clear that any new projects would need to be carefully prepared to avoid unexpected jumps in costs, as was the case in the past.

Icy conditions which intensified in areas around the country this week complicated the situation for countless motorists and pedestrians in the early hours of Saturday. According to the Czech news agency, ČTK, emergency services had registered 80 falls on icy Prague sidewalks alone by 1 pm on Saturday. Traffic accidents also increased, with some reporting that the municipal police were having trouble processing cases quickly due to the high number. Although temperatures have risen somewhat, motorists have been asked to exercise extreme caution due to the difficult conditions.

In related news, a driver was killed and his fellow passenger was seriously injured on Saturday on the road from Litvínov to Most. The driver apparently lost control of his vehicle on an icy patch and crashed into an electrical column for trolleybuses. He died at the scene.

In another accident, the father in a family of four was killed shortly 8 am after their car hit a tree in the area of Jindřichův Hradec. His wife and children suffered injuries and were taken to hospital for care.

The Czech hockey team suffered a debacle at the hands of Russia in their opening game in the second part of the Euro Jockey Tour, the Channel One Cup. The Czechs were soundly defeated by a score of 6:0; Russia’s Dajcuk got a hat-trick. The Czechs face Sweden next.

An 18-month-old infant died on Friday after being savaged by his family’s dog at their home in Prague’s Žižkov district. The news website novinky.cz reported that the dog was a pit bull. The child’s mother is receiving specialist care. Neighbours said the animal had been vicious and attacked other dogs. The Czech police register several cases of dogs attacking children every year.

The freshly installed minister of defence, Karolína Peake, says Prime Minister Petr Nečas reacted angrily to her dismissal of a number of senior Defence Ministry officials. Minister Peake told Czech Television that Mr. Nečas, who was in Brussels, had raised his voice during a phone conversation on Thursday. For his part, Mr. Nečas said she had no place making public their conversation. Among those the minister removed on her first full day in office was her first deputy, General Vlastimil Picek, a former chief of staff of the Czech Army. She said she believed top positions at the ministry should be filled by civilians. On Friday the opposition Social Democrats called for her resignation in a lower house debate.

The nine candidates standing in the Czech Republic’s first direct presidential elections have received their ballot numbers, following a draw by the State Election Commission on Friday. The vote will be held on the second and third weekends of January, with the two candidates who receive the most votes in the first round facing each other in the second. An opinion poll released on Thursday by the PPF Faktum agency suggested the front runner was Miloš Zeman, a former prime minister.

The speaker of the Czech lower house, Miroslava Němcová, has proposed what is known as a state of legislative emergency, in a bid to push through certain pieces of legislation by the end of the year. If approved by the relevant committees, the mechanism will allow one bill on judges’ salaries and another on the sKarta social welfare payment system to be passed in a single reading. It was last employed two years ago to push through a raft of cost-cutting measures.

A paltry 6 percent of Czechs think their country is “going in the right direction”, suggests a poll published on Friday by the STEM agency. Fifty-seven percent of respondents in the survey said they felt the Czech Republic was going in the wrong direction, while 37 percent said it was not going in any direction. Two years ago a poll indicated that a third of the population thought the country was going in the right direction; the authors of the latest survey said the increased negative outlook was down to people’s strong disillusionment with conflicts in the government, corruption cases and fears of recession.