News

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.

Fire-fighters have finished clearing a turkey farm in Tisove, east Bohemia where an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu was detected last week. It was the first occurrence of any type of bird flu on a poultry farm in the Czech Republic. Around 2,500 turkeys died, while another 6,000 were put down after tests confirmed the disease. On Monday the police reopened a road leading to the village.

Vaclav Neckar, a popular singer in the 1960s and '70s, collaborated with the communist StB secret police, Lidove noviny reported. Mr Neckar provided information on his group's manager to the StB before becoming an agent in the period 1978 to 1987, the daily said. He is also accused of informing on singer and Charter 77 signatory Marta Kubisova, a former band mate in the trio Golden Kids. Mr Neckar, who had a stroke in 2002, refused to discuss the allegations.

The Czech Army is to introduce field bakeries to make bread for its soldiers in Afghanistan and Kosovo, Hospodarske noviny reported. An army spokesperson told the paper that while on missions Czech soldiers were forced to eat American sliced white bread and missed their own Czech wheat-rye bread. Researchers at the Brno University of Defence said the lack of Czech bread caused psychological problems for soldiers. The Czechoslovak Army had 110 field bakeries in the mid 1980s, but they had all been closed down by 2002.