• 11/24/2003

    Three police officers have been accused of assaulting a group of Romany men in the East Bohemian town of Dobruska at the weekend. The accusations were made by witnesses to the incident, which took place in a local gambling bar. The witnesses said the officers had attacked the men without the reason. However a police spokesman said the officers themselves were assaulted and that coercive means were only used after the men became aggressive. He said one of the men broke several panes of glass with his head while being restrained at the local police station. The men face charges of assaulting a police officer and hooliganism.

    Author: Rob Cameron
  • 11/21/2003

    President Vaclav Klaus, who is on a four-day working visit to the United States, has held talks with the US vice president, Dick Cheney. During Thursday's meeting Mr Klaus told Mr Cheney that the Czech Republic, like the US, was not a "strong supporter" of the development of common European defence forces. The two men also discussed the situation in Iraq and the latest terrorist attacks. Mr Klaus has met several senior officials in the US, including the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn. Before returning to Prague, Mr Klaus was also due to meet members of the Czech community in the US and to visit a monument to the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

    Author: Ian Willoughby
  • 11/21/2003

    Meanwhile, the Association of Independent Trade Unions has called on President Klaus to veto parts of a government financial reform package. Officials said on Friday that over 100,000 union members had signed the letter, which demands amendments to legislation designed to combat the Czech Republic's record budget deficit.

    Author: Ian Willoughby
  • 11/20/2003

    President Vaclav Klaus, who is on a visit to the United States, is going to meet the US Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday to discuss global issues, including the situation in Iraq. On Wednesday, President Klaus gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and in the afternoon met with Senator Richard Lugar for talks about bilateral and international relations.

  • 11/19/2003

    The Czech field hospital in Basra is to leave the country before the end of the year, having completed an eight month long mission in the southern Iraqi city. The hospital treated both civilians and soldiers, conducting over 200 operations and treating over 10,000 people. Making the announcement in Prague on Wednesday, Czech Defence Minister Miroslav Kostelka said the hospital staff had done a great job and its work was much appreciated both by the allies and the locals. The field hospital is to be replaced by a Czech military police unit to be deployed 25 kilometres from Basra. The unit is to help train local police officers.

  • 11/19/2003

    The police is investigating an anonymous bomb threat which prompted a Czech airliner bound for the US to make an emergency landing in Iceland on Tuesday evening. The CSA flight, carrying 174 passengers, was forced to land in Keflavik after the US embassy in Prague received a hoax threat claiming there was a bomb on board. A search of the plane revealed no explosive. The flight's passengers and crew were housed in Iceland overnight and continued the flight to New York on another CSA plane on Wednesday afternoon.

  • 11/19/2003

    The Czech Veterinary Office has confirmed an eighth positive case of BSE or mad cow disease in the Czech Republic. The animal was from a farm in southern Moravia and vets are now debating the number of animals which will have to be put down and tested. The number is expected to be at around 200.

  • 11/19/2003

    An amateur palaeontologist has uncovered the first dinosaur bone ever in the Czech Republic, found within the vicinity of a quarry in Kutna Hora. Michal Moucka, a doctor, was walking with his children when he spotted a bone in the ground that brought to mind it might be a dinosaur's, later confirmed by professionals. The bone comes from a specimen known as Inguanodontide, a herbivore that lived around 95 million years ago. It was between 2.5 to 3 metres tall and 4 to 5 metres long. Experts are speculating the specimen may have been about twenty years old when it died. Interestingly, the bone has revealed tooth markings left by a primitive shark. Palaeontologists are now hoping to research the bone fully to construct a model of the specimen that would be displayed at Prague's National Museum.

  • 11/18/2003

    Austria's Ministry for the Environment has expressed protest at plans by the Czech Ministry for Industry and Trade to build a third and fourth reactor at Temelin, one of the Czech Republic's two nuclear power plants. On Tuesday Austrian officials said they had issued a protest at the Czech Foreign Affairs Ministry, through the Austrian ambassador to Prague. The protest is said to have stressed that presently the Czech Republic already produced a ten-percent surplus of electricity for the home market. Those numbers, Austria says, could rise to as high as 50 percent with the addition of two new reactors, a move seen as controversial by Vienna because of the full liberalisation of the electricity market in 2007.

    Author: Jan Velinger
  • 11/18/2003

    The president's spokesman Petr Hajek has revealed that Czech president Vaclav Klaus has signed four bills, out of a total of eleven, related to the launching of the government's finance reforms. Three of the four bills signed Tuesday will provide amendments to existing laws on health insurance, social security, and a tax on the transfer of real estate, while the fourth will freeze wages for elected officials over a three-year period. The government is hoping, for example, that its amendment to social security will help cut down on social security fraud while stiffening conditions for financial support, motivating the unemployed to search more actively for work. Meanwhile, the real estate tax amendment shall make the transfer of real estate cheaper as of July 2004, cutting the current tax from 5 to just 3 percent.

    Author: Jan Velinger

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