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In 1985, when he was a judge in the Pilsen District Court, Josef Baxa, now the President of the Constitutional Court, handed out a two-year suspended sentence to a seventeen-year-old man for attempting to emigrate, news site Novinky.cz revealed on Monday. Novinky looked through the archive of over 3,000 cases that Baxa handled between 1984 and 1989 and came to the conclusion that this was the only case that appeared to have a political undertone. Baxa told the Czech News Agency that he welcomed the fact that journalists had reviewed his pre-1989 verdicts.

Due to media pressure over his pre-1989 career in the judiciary, another candidate for the Constitutional Court, Robert Fremr, gave up his nomination in mid-August. In an interview that Baxa gave to the Czech News Agency at the time, he said that the public debate about how the communist justice system worked was valuable, but it had come too late. He also warned against viewing the past through a black-and-white lens.

When asked about his own pre-1989 past, he said he had worked mostly on cases dealing with general crime and did not remember emigrant cases, but admitted that there might have been one. However, he said that he could not be sure without going through the archives himself, as he had handed out verdicts in dozens of cases a month while serving at the District Court in Pilsen.

Tuesday will continue to be cool, overcast and rainy, with daytime temperatures of between 15 and 20 degrees Celsius.

The Supreme Audit Office has criticised the Ministry of Culture's handling of funds earmarked for the preservation and restoration of national cultural heritage sites as non-transparent and lacking clear goals. In the results of an audit published in a press release on Monday, the Supreme Audit Office said that the criteria by which the ministry assessed and selected projects to receive funding were non-transparent and unclear in three programs out of six, which created unequal conditions for applicants. They also said that the culture ministry failed to set out clear and tangible goals for what it wanted to achieve with its financial support, which made it difficult to evaluate what it had achieved.

The inspectors also revealed shortcomings in the evaluation of projects, which in some cases took a disproportionately long time. In extreme cases, the entire process from applying to receiving funding took up to one and a half years. The auditors blamed this partly on the fact that the ministry didn't have a digital system for handling the applications and had to deal with them in paper form.

The inspection covered 2.6 billion crowns earmarked for six restoration programs between 2019 and 2022, which the ministry divided among 7,457 projects.

Scientists from Czechia and Estonia have developed a new method for determining the recombination frequency in the wheat genome that will make crossing wheat with its wild cousins easier. This should enable climate change-resistant varieties of the crop to be created more quickly.

The scientists from the Institute of Experimental Botany in Olomouc (part of the Czech Academy of Sciences) and Tallinn University of Technology identified so-called "recombination hotspots", sites on the wheat genome where the exchange of genetic information is six times higher than normal, meaning the success rate of transferring beneficial genes from wild species of wheat to their cultivated cousins will significantly increase. The discovery will enable more efficient breeding, easier manipulation of the genome, and enrichment of the wheat gene pool to better cope with climate change.

Due to climate change, a growing world population, soil depletion and other factors, scientists say that it is crucial to breed more resistant varieties of wheat as quickly as possible. One way of doing this is to enrich wheat with genes from its wild relatives, which contain properties such as resistance to diseases, drought, and soil salinity, that intensively bred plants have gradually lost.