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05/24/2006
A group of anti-communists including former president Vaclav Havel have called on Czechs to go to the polls in ten days' time. They say many people who did not vote in the 2002 elections would have voted for somebody other than the Communists, and an increased turnout could mean fewer seats for the party, who are currently third in the opinion polls. Mr Havel and a number of other personalities will appear in a series of photographs with their heads wrapped in barbed wire.
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05/24/2006
A cinema in Jirkov, north Bohemia is refusing to show the hit film The Da Vinci Code. Manager Milos Kubelka told the newspaper Deniky Bohemia he was a Christian and said The Da Vinci Code undermined the values this country's democracy was founded on. Both the film and the novel it is based on have been slammed by Roman Catholic groups.
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05/24/2006
Meanwhile, the director of the German film Good Bye Lenin! says he does not understand why the right-wing Civic Democrats have used the movie in their election campaign. Wolfgang Becker said in a statement that the party's PR people could only regard the comedy as a warning against the dangers of communism if they were in a coma when they watched it.
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05/24/2006
The Czech Republic's tennis players have reached the semi-finals of the World Team Championships in Dusseldorf, after beating Italy 2:1 on Tuesday. Tomas Berdych and his team-mates take on Germany on Thursday for a place in the final.
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05/24/2006
The Czech international football goalkeeper Petr Cech has passed his maturita school leaving exam. The 24-year-old got a "one" in Czech, English and Social Science and a "two" in German in the exam, which took place at the Sportovni gymnazium in his home town of Plzen. Immediately afterwards he returned to Seefeld in Austria, where he is preparing for the World Cup with the Czech squad.
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05/23/2006
Czech deputies have overturned a presidential veto of a controversial Labour Code. The new law, which comes into effect on January 1 next year, was pushed through the lower house of parliament by the Social Democrats and the Communists. The opposition Civic Democrats and the two junior ruling coalition parties the Christian Democrats and the Freedom Union say the bill threatens the flexibility of the labour market and is unconstitutional because it gives trade unions too much power, and makes it difficult for employers to let go of unproductive staff and employ new people.
In November, over 25,000 members of 51 trade unions flocked to Prague to support the proposed new Labour Code in a demonstration that was the biggest that the country has seen since the Velvet Revolution sixteen years ago.
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05/23/2006
Social Democrat and Communist deputies also joined forces on Tuesday to override a presidential veto of a bill on non-profit hospitals. The bill, part of health minister David Rath's extensive reform of the health sector, is opposed by thousands of health workers, who say it is part of a plan to nationalise hospitals. In a desperate attempt to persuade deputies not to vote for the bill, representatives of smaller hospitals forwarded a petition with 230,000 signatures to lower house deputies before the vote was held. The influential Trade Union of Physicians, on the other hand, supports the law, saying it will guarantee affordable hospital care to all.
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05/23/2006
The Prague bourse experienced the 3rd worst day in its history on Monday, with shares in nine elite companies losing 150 million crowns in value over the last week. In a single day share values for Unipetrol, for example, dropped by 13 percent, Philip Morris by 12, with the main bourse index 15 percent lower than this year's max reached in February, the financial daily Hospodarske Noviny writes. Economic experts have said that the rapid fall in share value is the influence of a wave of selling on foreign markets. The deputy prime minister for the economy Jiri Havel commented developments by saying the decline was temporary, a sentiment echoed by other business specialists.
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05/23/2006
The Government Commissioner for Human Rights, Svatopluk Karasek, has said the Czech Republic is aware of human rights violations criticised in Amnesty International's annual report. The human rights organisation criticises the Czech Republic on numerous fronts - the country discriminates against the Roma, uses controversial caged and netted beds to restrain people in mental institutions, and fails to stop police officers from abusing their authority. Mr Karasek says the Czech Republic has already been taking steps to improve the situation.
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05/23/2006
A new scientific project is to recognise the role of ethnic Germans who remained loyal to Czechoslovakia, participated in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, and aided in the restoration of Czechoslovak statehood, Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek said on Tuesday. The three-year project, for which the government has earmarked 30 million crowns, will be overseen by the Czech Academy of Sciences' Modern History Institute, in cooperation with the National Archives and the Museum of Usti nad Labem in northern Bohemia. Modern History Institute director, Oldrich Tuma, believes some 100 people, who are still alive today, could gain recognition through the project.
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