News

Beer production in the Czech Republic increased by 3.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, the Czech Brewers Union said on Wednesday. The industry body put the rise down to a relatively warm winter in the Czech Republic, though it said exports were also up.

Police have deployed 60 more officers to search for a 13-year old girl who ran away from a children's home in Brno on Friday night where she had been placed earlier that day. The girl, called Anna, who reportedly suffers from social phobia and autism, had been previously staying in the house of a thirty-year old woman who was arrested last week after a neighbour discovered she kept her eight-year old son Ondrej naked and bound in the dark in a storage room. Ondrej is now in hospital care and is reported to be in a stable condition. His elder brother Jakub remains in a children's home.

Meanwhile police are trying to determine the true identity of the missing girl. It is also still unclear whether she left the children's home on her own, whether someone assisted her in her escape or whether she was kidnapped. The mother of the two boys and Anna's foster mother, Klara Mauerova, a child psychology student, has been remanded in custody and could face up to eight years in prison.

South African environmental inspectors discovered 10 poisonous snakes smuggled in video cassette cases when they searched a suspicious package at a post office, officials said on Monday. Working on a tip-off, the inspectors seized the package sent from the Czech Republic and opened the cases to find live albino monocle cobras, Arabian saw-scaled vipers, Namibian spitting cobras and Australian Taipans, reputed to be the most poisonous snake on earth. The snakes have been placed in a zoo in Pretoria.

Georgia's parliamentary president, Nino Burdzhanadze, on Monday called on the Czech Republic to diversify its energy sources by backing a trans-Caucasian gas pipeline that would avoid transiting Russia. Speaking at a news conference at the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Mr Burdzhanadze said it was important to think about security but also about energy independence and added his country suggested using alternative sources like Azerbaijan and Georgia. The call followed the weekend singing of a gas agreement between Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan aimed at increasing the latter's gas exports to Russia. Western European countries fear the move could make them more dependent on gas from Russia whereas they have been seeking to reduce their dependence on power shipments via Russian pipelines.