Press Review
The government session where ministers approved the state budget for next year finished shortly before today's daily newspapers went to print, so there is little information and no analysis. Instead, the papers focus on the government's proposed fiscal reforms which are closely connected with the budget.
LIDOVE NOVINY believes that the reform package is bad and the parliament should treat it accordingly. The reforms are not real reforms but a series of expenditure cuts, the paper argues, adding that the Social Democrat government apparently has no long-term vision to lay solid foundations for sustained economic growth.
It would be better for the future of the economy, LIDOVE NOVINY continues, if the government failed and necessary reforms were planned and carried out by a new, right-wing government. Transferring the burden to the main opposition Civic Democrats would be fair also because it was this party's former governments that started the trend of deficit financing back in the 1990s.
The business daily HOSPODARSKE NOVINY reports that the Industry Ministry is planning to expand opencast coal mining areas in Northern Bohemia. In 1991, the government approved the geographical limits of coal extraction. However, the ministry's new long-term energy policy would break the limits and relocate two villages standing on coal reserves.
Since World War II, more than 80 villages have been destroyed because of coal mining in North-Western Bohemia, HOSPODARSKE NOVINY writes. While under the Communist regime, there was no defence against such decisions, the two villages endangered by the new plans, Cernice and Horni Jiretin, won't give up without a fight. They also have a powerful supporter, the Environment Minister Libor Ambrozek. However, the Industry Ministry said it was prepared to have coal extraction declared a national interest, which would make it possible to relocate people and expropriate land and property to the benefit of private mining companies.
And finally on a completely different note, today's PRAVO reports on the first repository of stem cells to be established in the Czech Republic. A company called Cell Archive offers clients the possibility of having stem cells extracted from the umbilical cord of their new-born baby frozen for twenty years.
For a price equal roughly to 1300 USD, people can hope that one day, in the event of their child getting seriously ill, science will have advanced to such a stage that doctors will be able to use the stem cells to repair damaged body organs. Doctors say there is no ethical problem in this method because the stem cells are taken from a part of the body that is bound to die after birth and the sample can only be used to "repair" the donor or his or her kin in the blood line.
