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A twenty-nine-year old Czech woman was seriously injured after falling from a steep slope in the Pinzgau mountain region in Austria, the APA news agency reported. The woman allegedly fell from a height of ten metres. She is reported to have suffered a head injury and multiple fractures.

In his Christmas message to the nation, President Miloš Zeman praised the Czech coalition government for boosting economic growth and giving people hope for the future. Entrepreneurs are more ready to invest and consumers are more ready to spend, Mr. Zeman said, noting that trust in a better future was an important psychological factor in economic growth. The head of state moreover praised the government for its social spending policy, highlighting money spent to improve the lot of families with children and senior citizens and praising the cabinet’s decision to raise the minimal wage in order to motivate people to work. President Zeman said one of his main ambitions in office was to contribute to lowering unemployment since, apart from being an economic loss, it degraded human dignity and led to social exclusion. In this connection, Mr. Zeman highlighted the importance of his trade missions abroad, particularly that to China, which he said was already bearing fruit.

In reaction to mounting criticism of some of his words and actions, Mr. Zeman said he wanted to be the president of a sovereign country whose interests were not subject to outer pressure such as had been the case under communism. He stressed that he would not back down in the face of an angry crowd and reiterated his view that the group Pussy Riot were not real dissidents but a pornographic group with a vulgar name.

Hundreds of members of Prague’s homeless community were served with lunch at the Archbishop's Palace at Prague Castle on Thursday, the second day of the Christmas holiday in the Czech Republic. The visitors were welcomed by the head of Czech Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Dominik Duka, at the lunch, which was being served at the Archbishop's residence for the 10th time.

The chief of staff of the Czech army Petr Pavel paid an unannounced visit on Thursday to soldiers guarding a munitions depot in Eastern Moravia that has seen explosions over a two-month period. The military chief toured the site at the village of Vrbětice and spoke to some of the 200 soldiers patrolling it. General Pavel, who is set to take a senior NATO post next summer, reiterated his opposition to the government's deployment of the troops to guard the munitions store.