Press Review
People who like to eat their breakfast while browsing through Mlada Fronta Dnes are likely to choke over their coffee this morning. "The food you are eating may be full of poisons" reads one of the headlines. It is a disturbing article, in particular for those Czechs who live close to chemical plants.
The news is bad, Mlada Fronta Dnes says. The vicinity of chemical plants is usually badly polluted. The institutions which should be monitoring the state of the environment rarely ever collect enough proof to nail the polluters. And finally, the environment minister is aware of the problem but is not willing to do anything about it.
The paper has particularly bad news for people living in the vicinity of Spolana, a chemical plant north of Prague. Tests have revealed high levels of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls in eggs, poultry and fish produced in the vicinity of the plant. The state veterinary office has issued a ban on their consumption, the paper reports.
People are responding to the news in different ways, the paper says. Some are scared, others are apathetic and ignore warnings, arguing that the entire food chain is tainted in one way or another. One of the villagers from a nearby settlement told the paper: of course we know that it is dangerous to live here. But people are afraid to say a word against the plant - half of the people in this village are employed there.
Hospodarske Noviny writes that even though the lists are not complete since the former communist secret police destroyed parts of it, many people cannot resist looking into them to find out whether those whom they considered friends had not betrayed them to further their own interests. In the town of Pardubice, which had only 240 copies to hand out, some people queued up all night for it, the paper says.
And finally Lidove Noviny reports that the number of children born out of wedlock is steadily growing. In the first quarter of this year 27 percent of all children born in the Czech Republic were born to single mothers or to unmarried couples.
Sociologists say there are three factors contributing to this phenomenon. One is a loss of faith in the institution of marriage as such; many couples just don't see the point of tying the knot. The other is child benefits - single mothers get more money from the state. And thirdly, the attitude of society has changed in recent years - people are more tolerant and it is now considered perfectly normal for a child's parents to just live together.
