Mid-Week Briefing: Come Stay in Our Basement

Natascha Kampusch, the 19-year-old Austrian girl kidnapped and held hostage for eight years by a man who committed suicide after her escape, might come to live in Hungary where her family has a house in Nyőgér (Vas county), where basement imprisonment is far less common, not. After her disappearance, her parents moved from the Nyőgér house. They later divorced, but the house is still in their ownership. Local residents like the family and would welcome them back. [bulvar.ma.hu]

• A runaway horse and a BKV bus crashed in Budapest's District XVIII. The bus turned out to be the tougher one, and the horse was put to sleep on the spot by a vet and carried away by firefighters. The horse bolted while a little girl was riding it, and threw the girl off. She was not injured. [fn.hu]

• Also in District XVIII, a man fell into a 15-meter well last Thursday. A firefighter with mountaineering equipment abseiled down to save the man, who was probably under the effects of alcohol - otherwise he wouldn't have survived. [hirszerzo.hu]

• A young man riding a bike found a dead body swinging from a tree in a wood between Szolnok and Szajol (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county) on May 1. Firefighters arriving at the scene took the dead body off the tree, and the police are trying to find out who he was. The man probably committed suicide. [szoljon.hu]

• Firefighters were called to a Budapest's District III apartment in Wednesday morning after a man was reported throwing burning rags from his window. The 54-year-old, apparently in a confused state of mind, also spilled an flammable liquid all over his apartment and attacked the arriving firefighters with planks and other household objects. He is currently under observation in the hospital. [mr1-kossuth.hu]

• A BKV trolley bus took out a wall and seven cars, including a brand new one and an old-timer, on Monday. The accident occured after a driver failed to give way, no doubt because of the dumb "right-hand rule." [langlovagok.hu]

• A new technique is being developed in the Budapest center of German company Bosch to facilitate parking. With the new system, the driver only has to pay attention to the pedals and the gear, while the system chooses a suitably sized place to park, calculates the movements needed, and parks the car. If anything goes awry, the driver can take control manually. [automenedzser.hu]

• Football fans like to beat up one another. When there is no one to fight with, i.e. in the otherwise extremely poorly attended Hungarian second division, they attack their own team, as occurred in the Ferencváros locker room on Sunday following a narrow victory against the village of Tuzsér. The fans, angry with the overall poor performance of the team, followed them to the locker room where Cameroon loanee Edouard Ndjodo struck one of the fans, splitting his eyelid. The fight was stopped by police, and fans are requesting the abusive players are punished. [168ora.hu]