Press Review

The front pages of most of today's papers feature photos of popular Czech singer Jaromir Nohavica who was inducted to the Hall of Fame by the Academy of Popular Music on Saturday during a ceremony announcing the winners of the Golden Angel Award.

Jarek Nohavica, photo: CTK

On the international front, the papers lead with extensive reports on the first anniversary of the war in Iraq and mass demonstrations around the world. In the Czech Republic, protests were significantly weaker than elsewhere - only a few hundred protesters gathered in Prague and a few dozen Brno.

Petr Mares, Vladimir Spidla and Mirek Topolanek at meeting on pension system, photo: CTK

Today's daily newspapers also report on a joint decision by the heads of the ruling and opposition parties to establish an expert committee that should analyse and test all proposed variants of planned reform of the pension system and their combinations. The result, Pravo writes, is intended to be a broadly supported functioning model.

The business daily Hospodarske Noviny leads with a report on the junior coalition Freedom Union losing sponsorship donations due to its falling popularity. While the senior coalition Social Democrats and the main opposition Civic Democrats received ten million crowns each in 2003, the Freedom Union received just over 120 thousand.

The Freedom Union's popularity has dropped from double-digit figures two years ago to around two or three percent. However, the party believes the main reason behind the decline in sponsorship donations is that it has the strictest conditions for receiving donations and publicly announces all sponsors for transparency reasons.