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08/07/2006
The Czech foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, says it is almost certain that the USA will ask the Czech Republic to join its anti-missile defence programme. Speaking on Czech TV on Sunday, Mr Svoboda said that could involve the stationing of radars and the building of an anti-missile site with around ten missiles. A team of US experts has already surveyed sites in the Czech Republic.
In the same televised debate, Mr Svoboda also said the Czech Republic will not take part in an international military presence in Lebanon.
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08/07/2006
Controversial Czech businesswoman Libuse Bartova intends to run for the post of senator. Ms Barkova was sentenced to five years in prison for insurance fraud last year after making false property damage claims following the floods in 2002. Ms Barkova has appealed the verdict. She also made headlines in 2003 when her conversations with then Interior Minister Stanislav Gross and a Defence Minister were caught up in a police wiretap, and it was revealed that Ms Barkova owned a building housing a brothel. In an interview for the commercial radio station Frekvence 1 on Monday, Ms Barkova said she would stand in the Senate elections as an independent candidate.
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08/07/2006
Long-distance swimmer David Cech has become the first Czech to swim La Manche in both directions. Cech completed the swim from France to England in 19 hours 54 minutes on Sunday.
On Saturday, Yvetta Hlavacova set a new women's world record for swimming the English Channel one way. She swam the 36 km in seven hours 25 minutes. The swimmer hoped to set a record both ways but gave up after some 14 hours, with only around 12 km to go, due to exhaustion.
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08/06/2006
The make-up of the outgoing cabinet could change if the seventh attempt at electing a new lower house speaker fails, the acting chairman of the lower house of Parliament, Lubomir Zaoralek, said on Sunday. Two months after the parliamentary elections, the country has neither a new government nor a new lower house chairman. The outgoing cabinet contains ministers of the Freedom Union, which did not make it into parliament this June. With important decision-making ahead, such as next year's state budget, these ministers could be replaced Mr Zaoralek said.
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08/06/2006
The post-election deadlock has been complicated further with no new prime minister named, says Green Party leader Martin Bursik. In a televised debate on Sunday, Mr Bursik said party representatives might as well go off to their cottages as President Klaus has not entrusted anyone with the forming of a new government. Mr Bursik believes the President would like to see some kind of an alliance between the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats in government to get him re-elected for a second term in 2008. A statement issued by the Presidential Office says Mr Klaus considers the allegations offensive.
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08/06/2006
Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda says the Czech Republic will not take part in an international military presence in Lebanon. He also said it is certain that the Czech Republic will be asked to take part in a US anti-missile defence programme, either by hosting an entire anti-missile base or with the approval of the presence of radars on Czech territory.
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08/04/2006
The leader of the Civic Democrats Mirek Topolanek has met with President Vaclav Klaus to discuss possible solutions to the political stalemate that has gripped the country since the national election in June ended with an equally divided parliament. On Friday Mr Topolanek - whose party won the election - asked Mr Klaus to officially allow him to form the next government. He has in mind a Civic Democratic minority government that would seek support from all parliamentary parties except the Communists but including closest election rivals the Social Democrats.
Mr Topolanek stressed that if politicians weren't able to agree on such a solution, another option would be early elections.
So far, the president has decided not to broaden Mr Topolanek's mandate, opting to wait for further negotiations between the two largest parties.
Friday's developments, in any case, appear to be a final departure from Mr Topolanek's earlier plan to form a government with two other parties - the Christian Democrats and the Greens, which lacked a governing majority. It was categorically rejected by political rivals.
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08/04/2006
In related news, the Christian Democrats have made clear that while they preferred continued coalition cooperation with the Civic Democrats and the Greens to find a way out of the post-election stalemate, the Civic Democrats under Mirek Topolanek should be allowed to explore a number of ways out of the political crisis. The Christian Democrats' Miroslav Kalousek told reporters that his party "wanted to contribute to the quickest possible and most effective solution".
By comparison, following Mr Topolanek's meeting with the president, the Green Party's Martin Bursik at a press conference called on the other parties to now meet to officially dissolve their coalition. Mr Bursik said that following developments the project "no longer made sense", stressing that it was now important to negotiate terms for early elections.
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08/04/2006
The lower house of parliament has set a new date for its next attempt to try and elect a new speaker: August 14th, in other words, in ten days. All candidates for the post will be nominated by August 11th. So far, the lower chamber has made five attempts to elect a chairman since a new parliament was elected, but without success. Following two months of deadlock, Civic Democrat chairman Mirek Topolanek launched new talks with outgoing Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek this week to try to negotiate a solution. Negotiations between the two are set to take place over the next two weeks.
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08/04/2006
The central bank has warned that the Czech Republic faces growing uncertainty over its public finances amid a two-month deadlock over who will form its next government. Bank members highlighted "major uncertainty" over fiscal policy, in particular over public spending, in the minutes of a recent board meeting. The board said it was impossible to determine the direction of fiscal policy in the current circumstances. Elections on June 2-3 for the lower house of parliament resulted in an even split between centre-right and left-wing blocs, with each getting 100 votes in the 200-seat assembly.
The outgoing Social Democrat government, meanwhile, has proposed a budget that shows a deficit of 88 billion crowns (the equivalent of almost 4 billion US dollars) for 2007. The Civic Democrats' Vlastimil Tlusty said Friday in an interview fro the newspaper Pravo on Friday that the deficit was more likely to be around twice that level at 173 billion crowns. That, Mr Tlusty warned, would scuttle Czech plans to adopt the single European currency in 2010.
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