News

From January 2010, the Czech Republic will see an increase in value added and consumer tax. Part of a new package of austerity measures, the increased taxes are expected to generate an additional 23 billion Czech crowns. The Ministry of Finance hopes that the changes will lower the state budget deficit from 230 billion to 163 billion Czech crowns. Most affected by the tax increase are alcohol, cigarettes and automobiles. The price of a half a liter of beer will increase by 50 halers, the price of a package of cigarettes will rise by about 2 crowns in February. Value added tax will increase by one percentage point starting January.

The Czech division of the internet search engine Google is expecting a threefold increase in revenue in 2010, the director of the Czech branch of the company Tat’ana le Moigne told the CTK news agency on Tuesday. Mrs. Le Moigne added that Google was one of the fastest growing companies and that next year, thanks to the internet becoming an increasingly popular advertising space, growth in revenue would be very progressive. In 2007, the company saw a revenue of 28 million Czech crowns.

Ornithologists in the Moravian town of Přerov mourn the disappearance of a precious Whooper Swan that they had been observing for years. The bird, which went missing in early December, might have returned to its original winter migration destination in Germany, the head of the Moravian ornithologist association told journalists. He added that ornithologists would be grateful for any information on where the bird may be. Whooper Swans can be recognized by their yellow necks and the fact that they let humans approach them quite closely.

A water sample from the Czech Bílina river revealed that the river’s waters are severely contaminated. After oily substances had leaked into the river from a nearby Unipetrol RPA plant on December 23, water samples from the river were sent to a laboratory. On Tuesday, the samples have been shown to contain a hundred to a thousand times higher levels of certain poisonous substances than is legally permissible for rivers, lakes and other bodies of water in the Czech Republic. A spokesman of the local water authority told journalists that those levels will have decreased by now, since the samples were taken a day after the leak.