Spies Caught In the Web

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Czech Republic They became known as the "Cibulka lists" — some 200,000 names of alleged collaborators and officers of Czechoslovakia's communist-era secret police (StB) — named for Petr Cibulka, a former dissident turned free-lance StB hunter who published them a decade ago. Although the Czech government once forced Cibulka to stop posting them on his website, it's now putting its own version online.

On March 20, the Czech Interior Ministry (www.mvcr.cz) will post names of some 100,000 alleged StB collaborators, as well as 9,000 organizations the communists spied on at home and abroad. An online database searchable by name is in the works. Pavel Bret, a deputy director of the Bureau for the Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes, says the new disclosures should help victims of communist persecution deal with the past, but will also serve as a warning to "those who are too young to remember."

Cibulka scoffs at the effort because it names only alleged collaborators and continues to protect most StB officers, whom Cibulka has tried to expose as well. Meanwhile, he is raising money to restart his Web service. This time he is undeterred by the three-year prison sentence such an effort could carry. "I am happy to go to jail for it," he says. — By Jan Stojaspal

House ahoy! Road ahoy!
The Netherlands After centuries of finger-in-the-dike battles to keep water at bay, the Dutch are floating a different strategy. Why not live, work, shop — even drive — on the water? Builders in the Netherlands aren't thinking houseboats, but wood-and-aluminum constructions that float atop huge pieces of polystyrene encased in concrete. Six prototype homes have been towed to Ijburg, near Amsterdam. Imported from Canada, the concept dates to the 1930s, when lumberjacks built shacks on floating timber they couldn't sell, say developers Ooms Avenhorn. Another 250 houses — to sell for at least 3220,000 — are in the pipeline, as are 12 to 16 more developments. Even more ambitious are plans to apply the technology to roads. A 70-m prototype, to be tested in June, is touted as safe and stable. Still, watch those puddles. — By Abi Daruvalla/Amsterdam

Masters of Disguise
BRISTOL Walking down the high street, yakking on their beloved mobile phones, few Brits know — or care — where their phone signal is coming from. It could be transmitted from a chimney stack, drainpipe, the cross on the church steeple — or wherever else The Undetectables have been. The Bristol-based firm specializes in making unsightly mobile-phone masts disappear into the local environment. The build-up of 3-G networks means even more masts to disguise. The Undetectables got their start as film-set designers, but now apply their eye for detail to replicating bird droppings on the sides of fake chimneys and flagpoles, or more ornate concealments, like in a lead-glass window of a Bristol church. — By Hugh Porter