News

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will both attend a two-day conference in Prague to mark the Czech Republic’s accession to NATO, it was announced on Sunday. The conference will be held between March 12-13 in the Czech Senate. It will also be attended by Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg. The Czech Republic joined NATO alongside Poland and Hungary on March 12, 1999, eight years after the organisation’s communist counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, was dissolved. It was the first time in history that the Czech Republic had joined a transatlantic security system. Since, the Czech military has participated in a number of NATO foreign missions, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo.

A retrospective of the work of Czech New Wave director Ivan Passer has got underway at New York’s Museum of Modern Art - MoMa. The retrospective will last the whole month of March, during which some of Passer’s best-known Czech films will be presented alongside a number of the movies he made after emigrating to the United States. On March 6, Passer himself will present his 1965 film ‘Intimní Osvětlení’ (‘Intimate Lighting’). On March 9, the director will present the work of fellow Czech filmmaker Jan Šikl, who has won a series of awards in the Czech Republic for his cycle of documentaries ‘Soukrome stoleti’. Passer’s MoMa retrospective comes one year after a profile of the director’s long-time friend and colleague, Miloš Forman, at the New York museum.

Police are investigating 51 people in connection with allegations of corruption at the Czech Defence Ministry, and fraudulent tenders worth more than 300 million crowns (13.5 million USD). On Friday, a Defence Ministry spokesperson confirmed that a number of tenders dating from 2005 were being looked into. Andrej Čírtek admitted that one third of the accused were former employees of the ministry, though none of those implicated worked for the ministry any more, he said. The other individuals being investigated all came from private enterprise. The tenders in question all related to smaller-scale construction and maintenance of ministry properties.

Police have received five weapons as part of an ongoing firearms amnesty that, they say, were used in violent crime. An amnesty on illegal firearms has been running since the beginning of February in the Czech Republic and is set to last until July. On Friday, a spokesperson said that following forensic tests police were investigating the owners of five of the weapons handed in. So far, some 755 guns have been given to the police as part of the amnesty. This is the third amnesty of its type in the Czech Republic in recent years. Over 3000 illegal weapons were handed over to the police in 1996 and then 2003, including a WWII Soviet-made anti-tank rifle and a British sub-machine gun dating from the same period.