News

The government on Wednesday is set to debate the annual report on the Czech environment, published by the Environment Ministry. According to the report, the environment has been slightly improving over the recent years, with cleaner water and increasing number of households connected to a public sewage system with wastewater treatment plants. One of the persisting problems highlighted by the report is poor air quality, which is affecting especially the heavily-industrialised Moravia and Silesia. Air pollution is a problem especially in the winter months, when the situation gets worse due to city transport and coal heating.

Influential businessman Roman Janoušek, who is due to serve four and a half years in jail over a hit and run incident, is seeking to postpone serving his sentence for medical reasons. Lidové noviny reported on Wednesday that Mr. Janoušek had a letter from hospital chief and former senator Vladimír Dryml recommending he undergo a brain operation prior to entering prison and recommending that judges think twice before making him serve the sentence; any blow to the head could lead to extensive hemorrhaging, the document states. The businessman’s hit and run incident came in 2012, days after a daily published wiretaps giving the impression that he had held such influence over politicians and officials in Prague that he was a kind of “shadow mayor”.

The Czech minister of foreign affairs, Lubomír Zaorálek, says his country will provide neighbouring Austria with all available information relating to the planned building of a nuclear waste repository. Mr. Zaorálek made the comment on Tuesday after a meeting with his Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, in Mikulov, a town on the Czech side of the two states’ joint border. Austria has been a long-term opponent of nuclear power and says it will take all possible political and legal steps to prevent the Czech Republic building the nuclear waste repository. Seven locations are being considered for the facility, which should be in operation from 2065, including a number close to the Austrian border.

Over 60 percent of Czechs believe that work opportunities, social certainty and personal safety were greater prior to the fall of communism, suggests an opinion poll by CVVM published on Tuesday. By contrast, respondents expressed satisfaction with the amount of freedom they now enjoy; around 80 percent of those polled said that opportunities to study and work abroad had improved since 1989, as had access to free information. Two-thirds of those polled said they thought the political changes had been “worth it”.