News

Czech athlete Roman Šebrle finished 5th in heptathlon at the world indoor athletic championships in Doha on Saturday. The 36-year-old former Olympic and world champion was slower in both sprints, but showed good performance in shot put, high jump and pole vault. In the last event, 1,000 m, he managed to hold off Ukraine’s Oleksiy Kasyanov who got within five points of the Czech. Šebrle, who is the current decathlon world record holder, said he did not expected much more, given his recent injury. Brian Clay, from the United States, defended the title and took gold.

The lower house of the Czech Parliament on Friday extended the term of a British military training mission in the Czech Republic until 2015. The motion was supported by MPs from all parties in the house but the communists. Communist deputy Václav Exner told reporters his party opposed the presence of any foreign troops on Czech territory.

The British military training and advisory mission, consisting of around 30 experts, has organized courses for military staff from various NATO countries and members of NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme at a Czech army base in Vyškov, in southern Moravia, since 2000. The British mission also assists in the training of Czech army officers.

The Czech Education Ministry is pushing for compulsory pre-school education, Deputy Education Minister Jindřich Kitzberger told Czech Radio on Friday. Some 7 percent of Czech children miss out on the last year of pre-school education, many of them Romanies who come from a socially-challenged environment. The ministry believes an extra year of compulsory pre-school education could remove barriers Romany children often face when entering elementary schools. The ministry had earlier carried out a survey among teachers and parents, and says they welcomed the idea.

The Czech foreign minister, Jan Kohout, is not going to run in the general elections scheduled for May. Mr Kohout, who was expected to top the Social Democrat ballot in the Plzeň region, was rejected by the party’s regional organization, against the wishes of the party leadership. The news comes a day after the Social Democrats announced that Interior Minister Martin Pecina will head their ballot in Prague. The move provoked an outcry from the right-wing Civic Democrats, who said this breached an earlier agreement between the two parties about the support for the caretaker government. Prime Minister Jan Fischer reacted by saying that he would not prevent any member of his government to run in the elections; Mr Fischer said however he would make sure his ministers would keep campaigning out of their agenda.