News

A department of the Czech police that investigates communist-era crimes has started looking into a 1984 explosion in a residential tower block building in Moravia, the daily Právo reported. According to a testimony given by former secret police agent Karel Muroň a month ago, the explosion was not, as previously believed, an accident. Mr. Muroň claims that it was planned by the Communist secret police, the StB, in an effort to disband the Charter 77, a dissident group whose most prominent member was Václav Havel, who later became the Czech president. According to the testimony, the StB was going to charge members of the Charter 77 with having caused the explosion. Mr. Muroň claims he was one of the agents to take part in organizing it, but escaped to Poland before it took place. The explosion, which killed twelve people and injured nine, is considered the most tragic event of this kind in Czech history.

The head of the Czech Republic’s Constitutional Court, Pavel Rychetský, has said in an interview in Saturday’s edition of the daily Právo that the court’s recent decision regarding pension calculation would most likely not lead to a significant increase of state expenses. Mr. Rychetský said that the court ruling only affects about 8000 of the country’s three million recipients of pensions. Finance Minister Eduard Janota previously said that the change in pension law, which is to take effect in 2011, would lead to added state expenses of tens of millions of crowns. The Constitutional Court ruled that the current calculation scale for pensions of higher-income groups was unconstitutional.

Some 2500 scouts gathered in the Beskydy Mountains on Saturday at a site where five scouts were executed during World War II. The victims, aged between 19 and 26, were shot by German Nazis in 1945. Each year, scouts add stones to a stone mound at the site of the shooting. It was erected in memory of scouts from all over the world who died for a cause. The mound currently measures 40 square meters, with some stones from such distant locations as America or Peru. The five scouts killed were active in the anti-fascist resistance movement. The incident happened just weeks before the end of the war, when some parts of the country had already been freed from Nazi rule by the Soviet army.

The head of the Czech association of market research and public polling agencies has said that he believes the internet-based polling agency SANEP does not use representative samples of the population for its surveys. He added that because SANEP only conducts its polls online, older and less computer-savvy members of the population were less likely to be included. The director of SANEP has dismissed the accusations. He said that in this day age, internet users come from all age groups and that SANEP’s population samples were representative. SANEP specializes in public opinion and election polls.