News

Ornithologists who are trying to reintroduce the Golden Eagle to the Beskydy Mountains report the first success in four years. Two of 14 golden eagles to have been released into the wild since 2006 have finally started building a nest, the first on Czech territory in more than a century. The head of the team that has brought them back, Petr Orel, says this is a huge success since eagles tend to return to the same nest to breed for several years. Females lay from one to four eggs, and typically, one or two young survive to fledge in about three months. Ornithologists have refused to reveal the location of the nest for security reasons.

A survey conducted by the Food Inspection Authority at the beginning of this year indicates that more than half of Czech consumers don’t bother to read the small print on consumer labels. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they never looked at the small print. The reasons cited were that they did not believe what was written on the packaging, it was hard to read or that they selected goods on the basis of price. The vast majority of respondents said they would prefer to buy fresh products daily, but for the sake of convenience they shopped at hypermarkets once a week and went for bigger packaging in order to save money.

The Czech Republic’s footballers were beaten 1:0 by Scotland in a friendly in Glasgow on Wednesday night. The Czechs dominated play for much of the match but were unable to convert possession into goals. In three games under manager Michal Bílek the Czechs have been beaten three times and failed to score a single goal. Bílek said after Wednesday’s defeat that in the absence of the injured Milan Baroš his team lacked a player who could find the net in such games. The Czech Republic will face Scotland again in qualifiers for Euro 2012; their group also contains European champions Spain, Lithuania and Liechtenstein.

The minister for human rights and minorities, Michael Kocáb, has criticised public broadcaster Czech Television for showing communist-era news bulletins. Czech Television’s CT24 news channel has been broadcasting daily news from 25 years ago for the last three years. Mr Kocáb on Wednesday issued a statement saying it was just as indefensible as if German TV had screened news broadcasts from the Nazi era two decades later, adding that the communist-era bulletins were shown without any explanation of the historical context. Czech Television has refused to comment.