News

Culture Minister Jiří Balvín confirmed the decision of his predecessor Alena Hanáková in naming of art historian Jiří Fajt to the position of director of the National Gallery. Mr. Fajt will officially become director from 1 January, but starting next month he will begin preparatory work. He was first appointed by Mrs. Hanáková shortly before her resignation to replace the previous director Vladimír Rösel, whom she dismissed earlier this year. Mr. Fajt worked at the national gallery from 1993 to 2000, and has been lecturing at universities in Germany and the Czech republic for the past few years.

Hammer thrower Lukáš Melich became the first Czech to win a medal at the Athletics World Championships in Moscow. Melich took third place in the hammer throw final on Monday night, throwing just short of the 80-meter mark, behind Hungary’s Krisztián Pars and Poland’s Pawel Fajdek, who took the gold with 81.97m. And in the 20-kilometer speedwalking race on Tuesday morning Anežka Drahotová finished seventh, reaching a personal best and matching the Czech record.

In 2012, the Czech police force wiretapped eight percent more telephone numbers and 17 percent more people than in the previous year, according to information released to the Czech News Agency on Monday. The police tapped more than 6,200 phone lines last year, tracking the communication of almost four thousand people. The greatest number of taps was ordered by the National Anti-Drug Unit and the organized crime unit. Most often the police used wiretapping in 2012 in drug-related cases as well as during investigations of crimes, thefts and extortion. The police also purposefully jammed the phone signal in 34 instances during the year in order to prevent potential bomb detonation.

The former head of the Hungarian police during World War II in the now Slovak city of Košice and convicted war criminal, László Csizsik-Csatáry, died in Budapest over the weekend at the age of 98. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Mr. Csatáry was in charge of transports of thousands of Jews from the Košice ghetto to the death camp in Auschwitz in 1944 and was given a death sentence, in absentia for war crimes by a Czechoslovak court in 1949. In the same year he fled to Canada, where he stayed until his Canadian citizenship was revoked in 1997. He was discovered to be living in Budapest last year by a reporter and was subsequently placed under house arrest. In June of this year Csatáry was indicted for war crimes in Hungary, but the Budapest higher court suspended the case a month later, since he had been already sentenced in Czechoslovakia.