News

President Klaus has signed a bill proposing the establishment of an institute for the study of totalitarian regimes. The institution, to be created before the end of the year, is to examine the Communist and Nazi eras. It is expected to collect, analyze and make accessible to the public documents relating to the totalitarian periods of the country's history. The establishment of the institute was vehemently opposed by left wing politicians, who claimed it would be a waste of tax-payer's money and would make it possible to politically influence the interpretation of history.

A row over the privatization of ten health care facilities in central Bohemia may reach the European Commission. The opposition Social Democrats say they are prepared to file a complaint with the European Commission unless the sales are halted. The party mainly objects to the price for which the hospitals are being sold calling it daylight robbery. Under the agreements reached the region will receive 466 million crowns for the hospitals but the leading opposition party maintains that their value is an estimated 1.2 billion crowns. Richard Dolejs, head of the party's central Bohemian branch says the region gave preferential treatment to selected business entities which is at variance with European law.

The planned enlargement of the Schengen border free zone on January 1st of 2008 has evoked concerns on both sides of the Czech-Austrian border, says Tuesday's edition of Lidove Noviny. While Austria fears growing crime, the mayors of some Czech border municipalities are afraid of the growing amount of illegal imports of foreign waste. Villages in the vicinity of Kaplice now have to dispose of tons of waste in the nearby forests and along the roads that are evidently brought there by Austrian tourists, the paper says. On the other hand, the mayors welcome the introduction of joint Czech-Austrian police patrols within which Austrian policemen can operate in Czech border regions and vice-versa.

A Prague court has agreed to the reopening of the 1947 trail of the late shoe magnate Jan Antonin Bata. He was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in jail for not publicly joining the resistance to the Nazis. His nephew Tomas Bata, who is 94, appealed for the case to be reopened sixty years after the original trial, which he says was manipulated. Jan Antonin Bata did a great deal to expand the international Bata shoe company after its founder, his step-brother, also called Tomas Bata, died in 1932. He himself died in the mid 1960s in Brazil, where he had founded a number of towns.