Press Review

The vote of confidence in the government and discussion on its public finance reform plan in the lower house of parliament this week are dominating most papers today. All the dailies speculate on the chances of the opposition Civic Democrats winning a no-vote of confidence and bringing down the three-party coalition government. Internationally, it's Monday's terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Iraq as well as NATO's new secretary general that make the front pages.

The country's biggest business daily HOSPODARSKE NOVINY is the only paper that does not cover the public finance reform plan on its front page. It chooses to lead with some good news for Czech consumers. An analysis of the popularity of discount retailers shows that one fifth of Czech households shop in discount stores. Such shops are increasing in number and are forcing the competition to slash prices, the paper points out. It adds that the food industry has already experienced this trend and drugstores are now about to face the same pressure. The reason, it says, is the arrival on the Czech market of the German discount retailer Schlecker - known around Europe for its low prices.

And while HOSPODARSKE NOVINY has some good news, MLADA FRONTA DNES shocks its readers with a front-page article on child abuse in the Czech Republic. The paper says twenty thousand children are beaten, sexually abused, starved, or suffer psychological traumas every year. Some fifty children die as a result of such abuse. The head of the Our Child Foundation tells the paper she fears the numbers are much higher in reality, as the figures made public are only from police records and do not include the numerous cases that have not been reported. The head of the Fund for Threatened Children, meanwhile, says that these statistics are alarming because they are just as high as in Great Britain, which has twice as many children.

The Czech Republic has now been blacklisted by the United Nations Children's Fund, which assessed the number of abused children in 27 countries, the paper says. The Czech government has furthermore been warned of the problem by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which in a report last January criticised the state for failing to protect its children enough. Although it has been advised to establish a central office that would protect the rights of children, gather statistics, and keep a record of paedophiles, the government did not bother to discuss the matter until last week, when it decided to spend a year analysing the UN committee's report, writes MLADA FRONTA DNES.

And staying with children, thirteen year old Filip who went missing on Saturday evening is home and well, writes PRAVO. While his friends, family, and some one hundred rescue workers anxiously searched for the boy when he failed to come home after visiting his grandmother in a nearby village, he was happily taking a ride through the countryside. He slept at a bus stop, ate fruit he had picked off trees and drank water from wells. It was not until Monday that Filip was found - thirty kilometres from his home town, a local recognised him from descriptions on television and called the police. It remains unclear why Filip ran away, PRAVO reports.

The Jan Amos Comenius museum in the Netherlands, which faced the threat of being shut down due to a lack of funding has been saved by the Czech state, writes LIDOVE NOVINY. Last month, the town hall in Naarden said it was forced to cut spending on cultural institutions and would only be able to cover half of the museum's running costs next year and none in 2005. At a meeting last week, Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla and Culture Minister Pavel Dostal agreed to release the necessary 80,000 euros from the state budget to help fund the museum, the paper says. Jan Amos Comenius died in Amsterdam in 1670. His remains were buried in a chapel in the nearby town of Naarden. Since 1992, the Jan Amos Comenius museum next to the chapel has housed an exhibition on the life and works of the famous Czech teacher, LIDOVE NOVINY concludes.