News

Energy rich Kazakhstan is to take part in the EU’s ‘Southern Corridor Summit’ on power supplies which will be held in Prague next month, it was announced on Monday evening. The announcement was made by Kazakh Foreign Minister Marat Tazhin during a visit to Czech counterpart Karel Schwarzenberg. One of the Czech Republic’s priorities at the helm of the EU has been diversifying the bloc’s sources of energy. Prague has been pushing to lower the EU’s dependence on gas supplies from Russia. On a visit to Kazakhstan in February, outgoing Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek said that the EU was interested in purchasing direct deliveries of oil and gas from central Asia. The Prague energy summit focusing on that will be held on May 8.

The Czech Republic and South Korea signed an economic cooperation agreement during the visit by Korean Prime Minister Han Seung-soo on Tuesday. The agreement covers research and development with emphasis on nanotechnology, renewables and information technology. Outgoing Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek said that the European Union and South Korea hope to seal a free trade agreement by the end of the Czech EU presidency in June. Mr Topolánek also announced that President Václav Klaus will head the EU side at an EU-South Korea summit in Seoul on May 23.

Czech wine makers enjoyed a record year for production in 2008. The 2008 production at 820,000 hectolitres, and possibly up to 840,000 hectolitres, is around double the previous year according to the Ministry of Agriculture. It said the increase was in part due to the expansion of domestic vineyards. Whereas 11,236 hectares were under cultivation in 2000, this has now climbed to 17,000 hectares thanks in a large part to state incentives. Czech wine production in 2007 was also hit by frosts which resulted in a lower crop.

The Czech Office for the Protection of Personal Data announced on Tuesday that it would probe a leak of ‘sensitive’ data on politicians who attended the recent EU-US summit in Prague. The Czech EU presidency has admitted that a publicly accessible computer in a Prague hotel displayed information on EU officials taking part in the summit on April 5. The cause of the leak was ‘unintentional human error’, it said. A Finnish tourist stumbled across politicians’ passport numbers, flight details and medical information on a public access computer, the Finnish news agency STT reported on Friday. The office said that there was a serious suspicion that a breach of the law had occurred. The maximum fine for releasing confidential material is 10 million crowns, around 500,000 dollars.