News

Deputy transport minister Jiří Hodač has been named the winner of the 2007 “Ropák" or Oil Guzzler, awarded for the worst environmental policies. Winners of the anti-award are chosen each year by Czech environmentalists Děti Země. Mr Hodač was chosen for supposedly threatening to sue a number of civic associations in a dispute last year. The award is named after a fictional creature that lives off of industrial waste; it was invented by director Jan Svěrák in a mock-documentary.

Another to receive an anti-prize on Friday was President Václav Klaus. He was named as this year’s holder of the Green Pearl – given for worst environment-related statement in the media. The president, well-known for scepticism on the issue of global warming, questioned ecological devastation on the planet by reportedly telling Hospodárské noviny he’d “never seen any in [his] life”.

Five time Ice Hockey world champion David Výborný is headed for Prague’s Sparta hockey team next season. The player, who was signed with Columbus in the NHL, agreed to a three-year contract. Výborný was part of the national team which won the world championship gold in Vienna in 1996 as well as in 2005.

The police have arrested a man suspected of having stolen over 300 bronze name plates from the Terezín national cemetery. The plates bearing the names of wartime victims were ripped off gravestones sometime last week and were later found to have been sold as scrap metal. The incident has aroused widespread condemnation since the cemetery in Terezín, north of Prague, is a national memorial site. Terezín served as a ghetto for Czech and European Jews and housed a Gestapo-run prison during the Second World War.

Two American physicists, who are missile defense critics, have dismissed as near-useless a US radar system that Washington wants to site in the Czech Republic. George Lewis of Cornell University and Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim that the Raytheon radar system has such limited range that it couldn’t possibly play any useful role in European missile defense. The physicists published their claims in the May/June Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, asserting that Washington had “oversold” the radar, possibly to commit the US to a course that would later be hard to reverse. Meanwhile, Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, dismissed their criticism as unfounded, saying the radar had more than enough power for its defense role.