News

Almost 50 percent of Czechs agree with the toppling of Mirek Topolánek’s cabinet in March, a poll conducted by the CVVM agency and released on Friday suggests. Nearly 40 percent of Czechs, however, say that they are unhappy about the fall of the government halfway through the country’s EU presidency. Around 50 percent of those polled said that they thought the fall of the government had had an adverse effect on the Czech EU presidency. The fall of Mirek Topolánek’s centre-right government coalition in March was brought about by a no-confidence vote initiated by the opposition Social Democrats. This was the first case of a government being toppled in a no-confidence vote in the Czech Chamber of Deputies in the history of the Czech Republic, founded in 1993.

The Czech Chamber of Deputies may hold up to two extraordinary sessions in the course of this summer to discuss items which are not covered at the normal meeting of Parliament in June, Social Democrat Bohuslav Sobotka has said. On Wednesday, the lower house passed a bill calling early elections by October 10 this year, following the fall of the government coalition in March. On Friday, Mr Sobotka said that Parliament was currently ‘overburdened’ with draft legislation to be discussed, and that it should meet on several further occasions to get through the workload. The deputy head of the Social Democrats pointed out that Parliament already planned one extraordinary session at which a vote of confidence in interim Prime Minister Jan Fischer would take place.

In boxing, the formerly unbeaten Czech Jindřích Kubín was defeated by British Olympic champion James DeGale in Belfast on Friday night. The middleweight gold medalist from the Beijing games produced a powerful display to beat the Czech, who was fighting outside Central Europe for the first time. A combination of right-hand punches floored Kubín and DeGale pursued his opponent relentlessly until the referee stopped the contest before the end of the first-round at the Odyssey Arena in Belfast.

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has urged UN chief Ban Ki-moon to use his authority to secure the release of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi. In an open letter published by the ctk news agency on Friday, Mr. Havel called on the UN chief to personally intervene in the matter in order to prevent a show trial. The 72-year-old playwright, dissident and hero of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, said many people in Myanmar were in need of help since the junta had imprisoned more than 2,100 political detainees.

Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, is facing five years in jail on charges of breaching the terms of her house arrest after a bizarre incident in which a US man swam to her off-limits lakeside house in the capital Yangon.