Free public transportation: there’s a Socialist idea if ever there was one, but it’s a concept that is being tried out at an ever-expanding list of European towns. One of the latest examples – and probably most prominent, since it is after all a national capital – is in Tallinn, Estonia, where city trams and buses have been free for around three months now, as we see from Czech Business News:

V Tallinnu je MHD už čtvrt roku zdarma, město si to chválí: Estonské hlavní město Tallinn před tř… http://t.co/RxuMgp06e9 #czech #news

April 5, 2013 6:17 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@cznews

Czech Business News

Free to those registered as having a permanent residence within Tallinn, that is: not for those just visiting. So it seems you still have to check in at some ticket-punching or RFID chip-reading apparatus while boarding, it’s just that you’ll get the tickets/chip-cards you need for free if you’re a city resident. Others have to buy them – but don’t worry, you can use your regular euros to do that, Estonia has been in the Eurozone for over two years now!

(Be sure to save a 1- or 2-euro piece or two as a souvenir for the unique Estonia image on the reverse side! OK, it’s just a map of the country, but it’s different!)

As the piece reports, yearly spending on public transport amounts to around €12 million, but this scheme does tend to flush out those who can be regarded as city permanent residents – and so can otherwise be taxed – but just have not been up to now. Plus there are the other more-obvious effects: ridership up 10%, traffic on main city arteries down 15%.

As it turns out, if you’re curious about this urban experiment but don’t read Czech (or don’t want to put up with Google Translate’s version), the Washington Post recently offered its own coverage.

[Please note the correction added at the end of this blogpost.]

Now here’s a tweet you don’t see every day! It has to do with Václav Klaus, now the former President of the Czech Republic, but it’s not just about his departure from that office:

CN: Senát má rozhodnout, zda podá na Klause žalobu pro velezradu #klaus #senat #amnestie http://t.co/ebQLBOWPP8: http://t.co/yhHmp4QGPn

March 4, 2013 6:26 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

Velezradu: “treason.” So that’s “Senate must decide whether to charge Klaus with treason.”

“What’s that all about!” you might ask. It is a pretty poor good-bye present, don’t you think? Why couldn’t the Senate just have handed the ex-President a nice necktie, or maybe a gold pen?

But OK, this is fairly easy to explain in an American context, for those out there with long-enough memories. You might recall that the dying days of the Clinton Administration, back in early 2001, were rather by the ridiculous pardons Bill Clinton started handing out, most especially to Marc Rich, the financier who had made sure he was out of the country when he was indicted by the IRS for tax evasion.

Well, Václav Klaus did much the same thing as the end of his presidential term started to come within sight.around last New Year’s Day. He issued a wide series of pardons which mainly went – in a similar manner to Marc Rich, funnily enough – to businessmen guilty of abusing the Czech Republic’s system of “coupon privatization” for disposing of State-owned properties back in the 1990s, by “tunneling” many of those companies, i.e. systematically stealing their assets, sucking them dry, then escaping to foreign lands with well-stocked Swiss bank accounts. It’s no coincidence that by far the major actor involved in getting coupon privatization going was then-Premier Václav Klaus.

(OK, the České noviny report that you get when you click through the link in the abovre tweet also says that the Senate has also charged him with further harming the Czech national interest by refusing to sign duly-ratified laws that he didn’t like – for example, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty – and by paralyzing the country’s court system by refusing to nominate any new justices for a whole year.)

Well, it’s the justices of the Czech Republic’s Supreme Court which now get to preside over an impeachment trial:

Senát schválil ústavní žalobu na Václava Klause. Z 68 přítomných senátorů pro žalobu hlasovalo 38, proti 30.

March 4, 2013 3:57 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@iDNES_vyber

Zprávy iDNES.cz

Right, the vote among Senators was 38 in favor, 30 against. This probably isn’t about Klaus actually ever going to jail, though. Just as elsewhere, impeachment is mainly a matter of removing a sitting President who can be shown to have violated the law in a serious way. Conveniently, the Senate waited until Klaus had already left office – but he still stands to lose the payments he is still due from being President (e.g. his pension, though he has other pensions) if he is convicted.

BTW that same article has an instant mini-poll to the side showing 69% approving of the impeachment. Those numbers might change by the time you access that page later.

So Václav Klaus, second President of the Czech Republic, is not just going to fade away into the sunset; the Senate won’t let him. Things could get exciting!

P.S. Apologies that the IDNES tweet above announcing the result of the Senate impeachment vote did not have the usual link within it to allow you to go look at a Czech-language article. But let’s give IDNES (= the on-line paper of the Czech Republic’s biggest non-tabloid daily, Mladá fronta dnes) a bit of a break, they’ve had a hard time:

České zpravodajské servery čelí druhé vlně počítačových útoků. Weby iDNES.cz tak mohou být opět problematicky dostupné. Situaci řešíme.

March 4, 2013 3:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@iDNES_vyber

Zprávy iDNES.cz

That’s right, they’ve been hacked! There’s a lot of that going around among news organizations these days. Should you desire to access their website, it might not be working quite yet.

CORRECTION: Klaus has not yet left the Czech Presidency, his last day is 7 March 2013. So the Senate’s action has caught him in the last days of his term. Naturally, there is hardly enough time to resolve the treason charges during his remaining time in office, so this impeachment cannot have the effect of removing him as president.

Geography buffs find particularly interesting places in the world where major urban centers come close together but under different jurisdictions: the greater New York City metropolis, say, or the Liège-Maastricht-Aachen area in NW Europe. But there is one other that is more interesting even than these, featuring major urban centers once divided by the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, and that is the Vienna-Bratislava area along the Danube. (Which, if you enlarge it even further, also includes the Hungarian city of Mosonmagyaróvár – OK, we’ll forget about that one for now . . .)

Indeed, a major Bratislava residential area known as Petržalka (to the south, and infamous for its very many drab panelák Communist pre-fab high-rise apartment buildings, still there today) has for years crowded right up to the line beyond which no one was allowed to be seen, lest they be shot. Ever since that regime fell in 1989, travelers heading to Bratislava on the bus from Vienna’s Schwechat airport (e.g. your humble blogger) have still found it remarkable the way the villages and fields lying to that city’s east abruptly give way to crowds of buildings once you cross the border.

But now there is no more “border” – that part of the world is now in the EU’s Schengen Area. Slovaks are no longer constrained, and so now they’re breaking out::

Novinky: Bratislavané se stěhují do Maďarska a Rakouska: http://t.co/8XyLzZ69

January 4, 2013 1:14 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Bratislavans are moving to Hungary and Austria,” it reads. Yes: “moving,” as in “house.” This article – and note, it’s on a Czech news website – mainly discusses Slovak settlement in two neighboring places, namely the Austrian village of Wolfsthal – which you ride through on that airport bus – and the Hungarian town of Rajka, in the other direction but still only about 20km from Bratislava.

As recently as 2007, there were only three Slovaks in Wolfsthal, out of a population of around 720; now it’s 230 Slovaks making up a population of 900. The mayor, Gerhard Schödinger, certainly speaks Slovak – he has a Slovak wife! (And he used to be an Austrian customs official, back when there was a border.) As we can see, he also makes sure that the public signs dotting this Austrian town are bilingual German/Slovak. The Slovaks living there like it mainly because, well, everything is so German – “It’s peaceful here,” says one, “with beautiful Nature, order and safety in the streets” – but also because the Austrian government offers great social welfare benefits, topped off by easily-attainable and cheap loans of up to €50,000 for home improvement. (more…)

Are you in or headed towards the Czech Republic, but still looking forward to your marmalade at breakfast time? Sorry, that’s probably not possible:

iDnes: Marmeláda se nevrátí, Unie odsoudila Česko k rosolu a džemu: Marmeláda se do regálů českých obchodů hned … http://t.co/6FXkUxdZ

October 10, 2012 3:31 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

But don’t despair: it depends on what you call “marmalade,” as we learn from a recent article from Mladá fronta dnes. The European Commission is quite strict about what it allows to be called marmalade. That is one of the EU’s protected food designations – like “champagne” or “Parma ham” – so the Commission has demanding requirements: “marmalade” must at all times be made only of citrus fruits, and must have at a minimum 20% of actual fruit content.

A certain Czech foods company called Hamé realized it was about to get into trouble (e.g. incur fines) for calling some of its fruity breakfast-spread concoctions “marmalade” and so filed an appeal to be allowed an exception. That was rejected; the choices for the label are to be only “jam” (džem) or jelly (rosol). But it might still be what you yourself regard as “marmalade”; you’ll have to examine the label – yes, it will be in Czech, so instead just take the plunge and purchase a likely-looking jar and go home and see!

So now the Czech public can savor – if they haven’t had the chance before – the sort of laughable instance of EU interference in their everyday lives that people in older member-states have been complaining about for years. The thing is, that’s precisely the wrong audience, given the pronounced anti-EU attitudes already prevailing among many leading Czech politicians, notoriously headed by President Václav Klaus himself.

Finally, I mentioned that the Commission was “quite strict” about its protected designations, but that’s not quite true, even in the case of “marmalade”: in Denmark, Greece and Austria you can find products with that designation which do not meet the citrus fruit/20% content requirement. But that’s because the respective governments were careful to get their marmalade exemptions as their countries were becoming member-states, i.e. back when they had a little more leverage. The Czech authorities didn’t think of that back in 2004 when the Czech Republic entered the EU – they were busy defending designations a bit closer to home, like slivovice, a potent fruit-based alcohol.

ELSTAT: you know, it’s surprising this acronym is not better-known within the context of the economic crisis that has been raging since (roughly) 2008. And I mean in a negative sense, the way names such as Lehmann Bros., Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, etc. now call up unpleasant associations among most economic observers.

For ELSTAT is the abbreviation (from the Greek) for the “Hellenic Statistical Authority,” the Greek government’s official statistical agency. If you are of the view that Greece never belonged in the Eurozone in the first place – and many are, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy – then ELSTAT is your villain, as it was the false statistics it submitted in the 2000-2002 time-frame which led Greece to be admitted into the club when it was not ready, and may never have been. Similarly, ELSTAT was involved back in late 2009 when Georgios Papandreou won the national elections and became Greek prime minister, only to announce shortly thereafter that his country’s fiscal situation was way worse than he, the EU, and the general public had been led to believe (by ELSTAT) – and that was what kicked off the long-running Greek sovereign debt imbroglio which even last Monday’s deal with the “troika” (EU, ECB and IMF) has surely not definitively solved.

Anyway, there’s a new ELSTAT scandal now, and Dirk Elsner over at @blicklog tips us off:

Staatsanwaltschaft erhebt Vorwurf, dass Griechenlands Staatsdefizit 2009 auf EU-Druck zu hoch angesetzt wurde http://t.co/dG4DPUPY

February 23, 2012 1:13 pm via HootBarReplyRetweetFavorite

@blicklog

Dirk Elsner

There’s also an article to the same effect in the Czech press, spotted by @Zpravy:

tiscali.cz: Řecký parlament bude šetřit údajné “nafukování” údajů o deficitu: http://t.co/NgrpIbe0

February 23, 2012 1:10 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

What is going on? Well, once again ELSTAT’s numbers are said to be in error, and that for a political purpose. This time, however, you can say that the alleged fraud is in the opposite direction: numbers not falsified to fool outsiders, but rather to fool the Greeks themselves! The Athens public prosecutor now asserts that the Greek budget figures were actually exaggerated back at the end of 2009 – just after Papandreou had taken office – and this at the request of the EU. Specifically, the EU wanted to see a budget deficit figure of 15.4% – and duly got it – rather than the 12% which was reality. Why? For ammunition to use to browbeat the Greeks into the tough austerity measures they passed/started to pass then.

A Greek parliamentary committee is going to look into this. For now, the suspicion remains that ELSTAT is an agency not to be trusted by anyone, whether on the home or the visiting team. There is also sure to be an additional, unpleasant political effect if the Greek electorate starts to feel it was misled into adopting the painful budget/pension/wage cuts the government undertook to mollify the EU and to deal with its fiscal situation.

The next Russian election, the one that will inevitably elevate Vladimir Putin back to the presidency, is not until next March, but from a Czech source we see the political machine is already hard at work.

tiscali.cz: Předvolební kampaň na ruského prezidenta má první skandál: http://t.co/QasPJgmv

January 9, 2012 10:43 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Preliminary campaign for Russian president has its first scandal.” Yes, it’s scandalous, if not quite entirely straightforward, as explained in the accompanying article about the discovery made by opposition activists in Moscow of the wholesale fabrication of signature-petitions being perpetrated in local universities. (more…)

It’s the make-or-break EU summit, going on now within the cavernous Justus Lipsius European Council building in the Brussels European Quarter. Will what issues from this conference be enough to save the euro?

The answer to that remains up in the air, as the summit continues into the weekend. What we do already know, however, is that an important split has occurred within the EU, resulting from the failure of German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy to have accepted by all 27 member-states their proposals for greater national budget control and coordination. Now the action on that front has shifted to the group of 17 member-states who actually use the euro.

The excellent “Charlemagne” commentator from the Economist has already termed this development Europe’s great divorce, in an article (in English, of course) featuring at its head a picture of the defiant-looking British PM David Cameron pointing an aggressive finger towards the camera. And indeed, this one and many other press reports from the summit would have their readers believe that the UK is isolated in its stand of resistance against those “Merkozy” proposals for greater EU power over national budgets. That is certainly also the message from the authoritative German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, where an analytical piece from Michael König is rather dramatically entitled Bulldog Cameron bites the British into isolation.

But such observers should be careful about rushing into any over-hasty conclusions. They should remember that a number of other member-states share an attitude towards the EU rather closer to that of the UK than Germany or France. The Czech Republic, for instance:

iDnes: Klaus a Telička schvalují rozvážnost v Bruselu, ČSSD varuje před izolací: Prezident Václav Klaus označil … http://t.co/Qh043Qmm

December 9, 2011 2:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

(more…)

Bush – remember him? George Bush the Younger, I mean. There’s a strange story about him out now, picked up by @Zpravy (why hasn’t it gained wider circulation?):

prvnizpravy.cz: Bushovi krátce po 11. září řekli, že byl otráven: Exprezident George W. Bush dostal několik týdn… http://t.co/W5VNMsuY

November 1, 2011 9:44 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

I’ll translate the part before the colon (the part after is incomplete anyway): “Shortly after 9/11 they told Bush he had been poisoned.”

Yes! And we get more details in the article referenced in that tweet, from tiscali.cz. This all comes from the interviews former National Security Advisor/Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is now doing to push her memoirs. In particular, this story is from an interview she recently did with ABC News – the American, not Australian, one presumably.

Apparently there were serious fears that the White House had been contaminated in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks with botulin toxin – that’s right: Botox! – which, when not being used to smooth over face-wrinkles, is also one of the most deadly toxins known in nature. During a trip Bush made to attend an APEC summit in Shanghai, the jolly face of Vice President Dick Cheney, back in Washington, came up on the video-conference screen to say that Botox had been detected at the White House and all who worked there were going to die. “What’s that? [CZ: Cože?] What’s that, Dick?” was Bush’s first response.

Of course, this needed to be checked out at the laboratory, where several lab mice were infected with the White House material. As her aid Steven Hadley then advised Rice: “Let me put it to you this way. If those mice are legs-up, we’re done for. If they are legs-down, we’re OK.” Naturally, after a tense 24 hours of waiting – all while carrying on with the summit as if nothing was wrong – Bush was whispered the message “Mice are legs-down,” no doubt mystifying the eavesdropping Chinese over the Americans’ new code system, but leaving the American delegation hugely relieved.

Ah yes, the Pink Tank. It’s one of the foremost icons recognizable to anyone interested in Czechoslovakia’s throwing-off of Soviet rule in the 1989 wave of Eastern European revolutions. True, the events that made this war-chariot famous (by making it pink) did not happen until about a year-and-a-half after the actual Velvet Revolution, but they unquestionably represented a deliberate snub to the Russians.

We’ve had occasion before on this blog to discuss the maverick Czech artist, David Černý, whose rosy re-christening of the Russian IS-2 tank that used to stand on Soviet Tankers’ Square in Prague made him famous, but that was in the context of one of his later (but just as wacky) artistic works. Anyway, the focus now is on the tank itself: whatever became of it? Lidové noviny provides the answer, via the Czech Twitter-news service Zpravy:

Lidovky: Růžový tank přebarvíme, plánují ruští kozáci: http://t.co/oazjtJzQ

October 24, 2011 4:51 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“The pink tank we will paint another color, plan some Russian cossacks.” Yes, citizens of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (in Siberia, just east of the Urals) – including members of the “Cossack Tank Brigade” stationed there – are taking up a collection to re-paint it to another “special” color, presumably closer to the green of its original military purpose. They have also paid for a special plaque, listing WWII veterans’ names from the Chelyabinsk area, that they are asking the Czech government to place in front of that tank. It’s no longer at the square (now known as Kinsky Square), by the way – it was moved to become part of the collection of Prague’s Military Museum, and a series of six photos accompanying the article show the tank (still pink, and with what looks like a snorkel on top lending it a certain priapic aspect) being moved across the Vltava River that bisects the Czech capital.

David Černý, by the way, has no problem with any of this. His only question is whether the Chelyabinsk cossacks would like to hire him to re-paint the tank, or whether they’re just going to send some other Russian artist of their choice to Prague to do the job. Does he really need the money – or was he joking?

Amid all the brouhaha about S&P downgrading its rating for US Government debt, the parallel ongoing crisis in Europe should not be forgotten. “Crisis”? Take it away, Nouriel:

Definition of “crisis”: when officials need to huddle up on a weekend before Asia opening to take decisions & do statements a turmoil rages

August 6, 2011 1:43 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

The Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes, as caught by the @Zpravy Twitter-feed, has the details on this particular edition:

iDnes: Lídři EU chtějí rychle realizovat závěry summitu. Uklidní tak trhy: Vlády musí urychleně dokončit dohody … http://bit.ly/oLaqvt

August 6, 2011 11:30 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

Turns out, if you like, that you can blame everything on European vacation syndrome (e.g. “No one touches my August holiday!”): EU leaders want to quickly carry out changes from summit, that way they’ll calm markets is the headline here.

• “Summit”? That’s the one they just had, of course, an extraordinary convening in Brussels on July 21 in reaction to the Italy/Spain funding troubles.
• “Changes”? That has to do with the European Financia Stability Facility (EFSF), which leaders at that summit agreed would be beefed up to better be able to intervene to assist eurozone member-states in financial need, eventually even becoming a sort of European Monetary Fund.

(more…)

Pssssssst – looking to wreak some mayhem? Maybe a stag-party the likes of which has ever been seen? Well, turns out the police in the Czech Republic are running seriously short of ammunition for the 9mm handguns. This bit of helpful information has just recently been revealed . . . by Mladá fronta dnes (on-line idnes.cz), merely the top-circulation mainstream newspaper in the whole country!

Police having a hard time loading pistols, are sharing out last supplies
The police are struggling with a shortage of 9mm ammunition, which is fired by the service-pistols of practically every officer of the law. Police commanders assert that a disturbance in the procurement procedure is at fault and that they’re already preparing a new one. Meanwhile well-supplied police agents are sharing with those having trouble with their supplies.

So go ahead, head on over there, find some outlet ready to sell/rent you some firearms (harder than in the US, but by no means impossible), and go to town: you’ll surely out-gun the local authorities. Especially after you realize, along with me, that that picture of a well-filled box of ammo at the top of the on-line article indicates no relief: those are military rifle-grade rounds, not pistol ammunition.

Allow me to bring up an interesting article, plucked from my incoming Twitter-feed, that has languished a while among my bookmarks. It’s from the website of Ekonom, the weekly economy/business magazine affiliated with the leading Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny; entitled How Hooligans Are Caught, it describes an episode of Czech export success of a quite unexpected sort, from a firm with the rather funny name (even in Czech) of Integoo – namely providing anti-hooligan security at football stadiums.

I suppose what Integoo is selling fairly describes every stadium-manager’s dream, as this security system has at its core a combination of video-cameras and software that enables fairly precise facial recognition. Most soccer/football clubs these days (at least in the Western world) operate on the basis of “club cards” or “season tickets” held by their established set of fans, who are expected to attend a majority of games, with only limited tickets for each match left over for casual visitors. So when you apply to get your club card, you have to provide a photograph of yourself; that then enables the Integoo security system, when someone tries to go past the stadium turnstiles for a match, to match up the face of the person holding the ticket with the face of the person on record – and to block the turnstile either if the faces do not match or if that face has become officially undesirable due to past bad behavior.

Only the Krakow club KS Cracovia is benefiting from purchasing and installing this system as of yet, according to the article. So it’s obviously a sort of guinea-pig for the technology, which will presumably spread far more widely, and quickly, once it has proven itself there.

Make no mistake, Polish football needs something of this sort of technology, for at least two reasons: 1) Polish football hooligans are a real problem! (Everyone hears about English hooligans – or did, until a few years ago when the problem seems largely to have died down – but their Polish counterparts have long been a serious societal scourge.) And 2) You might have heard about that Euro 2012 football tournament coming up, to be held in Poland and the Ukraine (if the latter can actually get its act together in time) – football stadiums hosting those games will have to deal with hooligans from all corners of the continent!

Then again, there’s more than a whiff here of all the bad associations conjured up by the mention of George Orwell’s title “1984.” On the one hand, it’s understandable why this is happening here from these lands’ recent pasts under oppressive Communist governments, which would have lept to implement such technology – for purposes way beyond just football – had it been available then. On the other, it’s hard imagining the Czech Republic as being the locale for this sort of pioneering technology – but I guess that just unfairly maligns that country, which actually boasts inter alia considerable programming talent, as evidenced by world-class anti-virus software companies and the like. Still: Is this sort of face-recognition set-up all that pioneering? Surely something similar has been implemented already elsewhere, somewhere in the world?

One of the most fantastic military adventure stories in history, but which few people have ever heard of, is that of the Czechoslovak Legions. Czechs and Slovaks have generally heard about them, as you would imagine, but as an article in Lidové noviny makes clear, that fact doesn’t necessarily command any Czech government money (nor Slovak, probably) any more.

Students of European history know that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was involved in World War I on the German side (the “Triple Alliance”) from the very beginning – logically, since that Empire was dominated administratively by German-speakers. However, a large part of its soldiery was made up of Slavs, with no particular affinity for things German. (Which Hungarians, however, did have – but that’s another story!) Finding themselves on the Russian front, ordered to fight and kill fellow Slavs on the other side of the trenches, many of these soldiers soon found that they would rather just desert at the first opportunity – and indeed, then form into units on the other side that would fight for the Russians. (more…)

Let me reveal a dark secret here which I haven’t written about before (well, OK, just once) and may come as a surprise to many of you: The Czech Republic – yes, the land of Václav Havel and “living in Truth” – is, sadly, a corrupt sort of place. We were only recently reminded of that fact by the latest government scandal (the best English-language summary comes undoubtedly from the Economist’s “Eastern approaches” blog). The Environment Minister, one Pavel Drobil, was caught on tape not only manipulating expenditures from the state environmental fund to feather his own financial nest, but also covering the misdeeds up – to include offering the whistle-blower a promotion in exchange for destroying the recording. Drobil did have to resign (though the whistle-blower also lost his government job, but of course), and for a while the very existence of the current Czech coalition government (only 6 months old) hung in the balance, because the opposition tabled a motion of no-confidence in the parliament and, after all, two of the coalition parties (VV and TOP 09) were new on the political scene, propelled to prominence by citizen disgust over the country’s seeming political status quo – most especially, the corruption.

In the end though, President Klaus intervened, there were a lot of meetings, everyone forgot about how anti-corruption they were supposed to be, and the current government managed to sail on. With that settled, what do we now see – and in the pages of the country’s leading business newspaper, no less! – but today’s piece by one Petr Honzejk entitled The Czech Republic is better than it seems. Masaryk’s “do not fear and do not steal” is coming back in style.

Make no mistake: the title is the basic message, but I’m glad to give you the lede as well:

There’s no use in fooling oneself. It’s enough when we can use a little realism. We live in a better country than we ourselves think.

Talk about looking on the bright side! With this latest Environment Ministry affair everyone is wailing “Nothing has changed!” Honzejk writes – but they’re wrong! Hey, at least there was a whistle-blower in the first place, who resisted all the lucrative pressure exerted to shut him up! And look, the minister resigned the same day the charges came to light – that has never happened before! He goes on:

This isn’t some exercise in naïveté. Nor the obligatory pre-Christmas optimism. Only a mention that, so long as we choose anything other than a self-tormenting point-of-view, we will see a better country in all directions than a year ago.

Like: Hey, we got a new government this year and escaped that “Paroubek goulash populism” we were all stuck in coming into 2010! (Jiří Paroubek actually was Prime Minister from 2005-06, but I guess he has continued to have a lot of behind-the-scenes influence.) And it’s a new government committed to enacting reforms! he adds. Stipulated – but surely his position as a writer for Hospodářské noviny enables Honzejk to be aware of the shameful compromise that has kept this government propped up, as well?

It’s almost comical, the happy-talk rabbits he tries to pull out of his hat here while trying to retain an even-handed, judicious tone. “[The Czech political scene] is no utopia,” he concedes, “as the Motolska Hospital affair showed us this year.” (Wait, I never even heard about that one! But I probably don’t want to know!) But look, research shows that the amount of illegal software installed on Czech computers has declined! Hooray!

No, the Czech Republic can no longer be regarded as belonging to the “Wild East,” he asserts. After all, the EU has decided to put the office of its Galileo GPS program in Prague. And the British news paper The Telegraph recently named Prague “the best vacation destination in the world,” while no less than the New York Times back in April had a laudatory (if rather short) travel article about the country’s #3 city, Ostrava (over on the eastern border).

OK, Prague is very nice to visit, but about Ostrava I don’t know for sure, having never visited there. However, my suspicion is aroused by phrases in that NYT piece like “Ostrava’s most famous symbol was a 1,033-foot-high slag heap” and “grimy reputation” and “derelict sites.” I suspect the travel writer is trying rather too hard here to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – as is, for that matter, Petr Honzejk in his “don’t worry, be happy!” article. That his argument can be put forth in a leading business newspaper must certainly be the very definition of “protest[ing] rather too much“; we should rather all keep in mind the Economist’s rather more gloomy conclusion: for the Czech Republic “[t]he gloss is off.”

I may run the risk of lowering the usually elevated tone of Eurodiscourse that I try to uphold on this blog. But the following is not really pornographic. (A tip for those of a certain age: the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally” – relevant here, as you’ll see! – got an “R” rating, which many considered too strict.) Anyway, this comes to us from the Young Socialists of Catalonia, via Reuters and the hyperactive Czech Twitter-feed Zpravy:

There is a point here, and it concerns the regional elections due to take place there next Sunday (28 November). The Young Socialists want people to be sure to turn out to vote – the “tag-line” message at the end of this clip is “Voting is a pleasure” – and preferably, of course, for Socialist candidates. That’s about it for any serious purpose, though, so the whole thing is rather overboard, a clever idea, but one that probably never should have been actually carried out. It should be no surprise that the clip was roundly condemned by spokesmen and -women from the more conservative parties on the political spectrum, as well as by some Socialist members of government in fact. The BBC website captured probably the best quote, from Joan Herrera, leader of the Catalonia Greens (and a man: “Joan” is a man’s name in Catalan): that it would be “very difficult to reach orgasm voting for any of the candidates, myself included.”

But Spain: how could something like this come from Spain? However, this is not your father’s (or at least your grandfather’s) Spain, that dictatorship of the Caudillo propped up by an unreformed and reactionary Catholic Church. It has changed, dramatically, and the watershed was in 1975, when dictator Francisco Franco’s death and the resulting return to democracy (institutionalized in a new constitution of 1978) prompted Spain to some extent to swing way to the other extreme and become an “anything goes” society. Abortion was legalized as well as divorce – together with, more recently, gay marriage. Cinema aficionados can refer to the award-winning films of Pedro Almodóvar for a series of (slightly exaggerated) portraits of this new prevailing culture – prevailing in Spanish cities, at least.

So, you say you’ve never been to Spain
But you kinda like the music?
Well, the ladies are insane there
And they sure know how to use it
They don’t abuse it
Never gonna lose it
You won’t refuse it!

The scoop ultimately belonged to the Financial Times, but that article is ensconced behind their semi-porous paywall. So here at €S we had to get the news from Lidové noviny, from the Twitter alert by @cznews (Oh no! Not Rozpočtoví hříšnici!):

Rozpočtoví hříšnici v eurozóně zaplatí pokutu ve výši 0,2 % HDP: Země eurozóny, které v budoucnosti po... http://bit.ly/9X8tCn #czech #news

September 24, 2010 9:09 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@cznews

Czech Business News

And a scoop it truly is, for the FT journalists (Peter Spiegel and Joshua Chaffin) have unearthed proposed “legislation” set to be officially unveiled by Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn next Wednesday, which their article terms “the EU’s most ambitious attempt to reorder its economic governance since this spring’s debt crisis that nearly destroyed the single currency.” Basically, the Commission would step up to take up a role in examining the national budgets of the 16 Eurozone member-states in a big way, with the authority to impose fines of 0.2% of GDP on governments which “consistently fail to bring down their public debt levels” – or “fail to control their annual spending,” or “fail to reform their economies to improve their competitiveness.” Once having decided to fine a member-state, the Commission under the proposal could only be stopped by a qualified majority vote from the European Council within 10 days of the decision. (Similar rules for member-states still outside the Eurozone will apparently be forthcoming later.)

Even just ignoring recommendations about how to improve national competitiveness (from the Commission presumably; and so how can they really be described as “recommendations”?) could make a government liable to a 0.1% of GDP fine. And, somewhat ludicrously, the Commission would also maintain a productivity data “scoreboard,” sort of like the running list of grades on an elementary school classroom wall.

Pretty amazing – especially when those of us with any sort of historical memory (it need not go back any further than ten years or so) recall the Stability and Growth Pact that was a key component to the introduction of the euro at the end of the 1990s. That also prescribed monitoring of (Eurozone) member-states’ public finances by the Commission; and it also prescribed “sanctions” (initially fines) for those governments who continued to violate the fiscal rules (budget deficit less than 3% of GDP, national debt less than 60% of GDP or getting there) after repeated warnings.

But it didn’t work: among the first to break these rules were the giants making up the EU’s “axis,” namely Germany and France, and no one ever dared to try to punish them in any way. Besides, there was always the fundamental bit of illogic in such arrangements of trying to punish by means of a monetary fine a government which has gotten into trouble because it doesn’t have enough money available.

So Why Now?

What’s the difference this time, that makes Commission staff think that these sorts of proposals will be accepted, and that they even will work if enacted to influence member-state government behavior? Obviously it’s the big Greek/Spanish/Portuguese/Irish/etc. debt crisis of 2010, which in May prompted the panicked assembling of a €700 billion+ support fund for states in trouble with their sovereign debt. It’s by no means clear that that will be enough to head off trouble; it’s by no means clear, for example, that Greece will in fact be able to avoid default (or, probably, the same thing camouflaged as debt “restructuring”).

Neither is it clear that member-states will be at all receptive to these latest Commission proposals as they are formally presented next week (together with similar ones from Council President Herman van Rompuy). It’s hard to avoid the thought that this sort of supervision of their budget processes from an external, super-national body of experts, backed up by sanctions with financial teeth, was not what most if not all of them thought they were getting into when they joined the EU and then the Eurozone. That historical process of European integration is likely about to face a decisive “gut check” moment, coming up next week.

“Not again!” That was surely the reaction among recent travelers to/from airports in Ireland, Scotland, and even some parts of Northern England upon finding that, once again, flights had to be canceled for a brief period due to airborne ash from that Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano. In the meantime, Scottish government officials issued predictably annoyed statements aimed at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority for taking such action, just like on a larger scale it had been loud complaints from all across the affected area that had hastened the lifting of the continent-wide flight ban that paralyzed air travel within Europe for more than a week last month.

Central to the European complaints had been assertions that the flight-bans were too extreme, that the ash really did not pose enough of a danger to justify the considerable economic damage that the bans caused – after all, a number of airlines actually went ahead and flew test-flights on their own responsibility (manned only by crews and observers, of course) up into the grit-cloud and everything seemed fine. Now the Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny reports on how Europe’s scientific community is finally getting its act together with some direct research aimed at setting firm norms for when it’s safe to fly in volcano ash, and when it is not. (more…)

Health Care Reform is now on the lawbooks in the US, barring the unlikely event of a successful Constitutional challenge. As Europe reacts to this unexpected development – everyone thought that it couldn’t be done, particularly back in January – the prevailing attitude seems to be “Welcome to the club of states who don’t turn their back on the sick and the poor.” This new legislation does insert the US government more into the national health care business, in good European style, partly in order to finally enable (mandatory) insurance coverage for the 40 millions or so who are presently not covered.

But it’s always useful to remember that European opinion is never monolithic, even when it comes to the universal health coverage which has been the general rule there, in one form or another, since at least the 1960s. Not everyone in Europe opposed George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example; sure, the British even joined in with their own troops, but so did the Poles. And for one contrary view on America’s new Health Care Reform – one that is doubtful, not welcoming, but presumably intellectually palatable nonetheless – we have Czech commentator Radek Palata writing in the business newspaper E15 (USA: Savings don’t come for free). (more…)

The memoirs of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s supposed “Brain,” are now out. (Sigh . . . yes, I give you the link there to Amazon, even though they gravely miscategorized the work by not filing it under “fiction.”) The European reaction to this event is so far disappointing, in terms of any demonstrated willingness to call out pure hooey, bunk, baloney, poppycock for what it is, using any equivalent term in the local language.

We do have at least a start, with Marcus Ziener in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt of all places (The president’s eternal string-puller). He zeroes in (as does Rove in his book, apparently) on the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – two of the George W. Bush administration’s biggest blunders, but not to hear Rove tell it. No, they were just unfortunate misunderstandings. Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie!” was nothing more than a gesture of morale support to a staff-member under pressure. And as for Iraq, the President was certain Saddam had WMD – he certainly would not have invaded the country at all had he known that he didn’t.

Up in his piece’s lede, Ziener makes the rather obvious observation that, with this book and the new publicity tour designed to sell it, Bush’s former leading political strategist is out to rehabilitate not only the reputation of the president he served, but also his own. Actually, it probably goes rather beyond that: when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rove (along with some other involved officials, especially former VP Dick Cheney) apparently feels the need to take some pre-emptive action to ward off a potential criminal indictment for conspiracy to torture – a crime against humanity all of us can recognize when we see it, and contrary both to the Geneva Conventions and US law. This lashing-out is what we see in his statement yesterday to the BBC in which he asserted he was even “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists.” (You can click the video on that BBC page to hear the words come out of “Turdblossom’s” very mouth; for me, hearing his voice this morning was all I needed to quickly switch to some other radio station.)

And again, reaction in the European press is disappointing so far. (Of course, less time has elapsed since Rove went on the BBC.) What there is, is generally just a straight transmission of his remarks, suitably translated. At least we do have Lidové noviny of the Czech Republic (Waterboarding is not torture, assets former Bush advisor). Yes, the report itself (from the Czech news agency CTK) just passes on what Rove has to say. But some on-line editorial assistant has also shrewdly inserted counterpoint in the form of a brief YouTube video about waterboarding from Amnesty International. (Check it out, if you want: it’s not so very shocking, even as it makes the point.)

UPDATE: Look, I don’t intend to touch Rove’s book with a ten-foot pole. But if you’re interested, I do have to admit that it’s still available from Amazon (at that link I gave you at the top of the post) for $16.50 with free shipping and mishandling (h/t to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon).

An interesting revelation came to light just yesterday, in a program broadcast on the private Polish TV station TVN. So far – strangely – I have found the story picked up only by the premier Flemish newspaper De Standaard and by the Czech mainstream daily Mladá fronta dnes. (That’s right: nothing in the Polish on-line press, yet.)

Of particular interest in that program was the interview it included with former Polish general Czesław Kiszczak, who headed the Interior Ministry of that then-Communist country from 1981 through 1989 – thus for the entire period of martial law that was initiated in mid-December 1981 in response to the growth in popularity of the Solidarity movement. General Kiszczak was willing to openly admit that Communist Poland provided shelter and weapons to Palestinian terrorists on the lam during the 1970s and 1980s, including to Abu Nidal, head of the Black September group which was responsible for the hostage-taking and massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 summer Olympic games in Munich, among other incidents. “We closed our eyes to the fact that they came to Poland to recuperate and equip themselves for further terrorist actions,” Kiszczak admitted. Poland was also quite willing to help with such preparations by selling these militants as many weapons as they wanted. Abu Nidal was even allowed to run a business in Poland – known by the name or abbreviation “SAS” according to the MFD account – for a while in the 1980s.

Former Polish president Wojciech Jaruzelski (thus Kiszczak’s colleague and immediate superior) was also interviewed for the program, according to De Standaard’s account. He could not recall anything of the sort happening.

The pirate threat in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali coast is still very real, and Denmark recently was given the opportunity for the very first time to be in charge of the collection of NATO frigates (currently four) conducting anti-pirate operations in that area under the name Operation Ocean Shield. From January 25 Danish fleet admiral Christian Rune took over command, as his flagship Absalon set sail for the area after a stop in port at Muscat, the capital of Oman. He will stay in charge until March.

(Absalon – pictured here, photocredit to Uncle Buddha on Flickr – was the “fighting archbishop” of the Danish Middle Ages, who did much to build up Copenhagen towards the city it was to become by building a fort there. His statue is there in the city’s center, mounted on a magnificent rearing horse, in Højbroplads – that’s the square right by the Folketing, Denmark’s one-chamber parliament. The main sort of enemy he fought in his day, it turns out, was in fact Baltic Sea pirates.)

It’s no surprise that the Absalon has already seen some action, and the Danish press is following along to report. (more…)

Since last September, relations between fellow EU-members (and NATO allies; but also with a very troubled historical relationship) Slovakia and Hungary have been rather bad, due to a Language Law that took effect then in Slovakia mandating the use of Slovak in all communications with any government organizations – the only exception being within those localities where people speaking other languages constitute 20% or more of the population. In Slovakia, that can really only be Hungarians, and it’s true that in some places they do reach that 20% threshold, but not many. And if you try to communicate with a language other than Slovak in those many other places where you’re not allowed to, you can get hit with a fine – up to €5,000!

One excellent window onto this controversy is the main Czech business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny, which now has an article on the latest development: Bratislava is in a rage: Budapest to contribute to countrymen in Slovakia towards fines for Hungarian. Put simply: the Hungarian government is raising a fund of money – mainly from its own resources, although private contributions are also encouraged – to pay the fines and legal costs for Hungarian-nationals in Slovakia that run afoul of that Language Law. Even though those that do so will by definition be Slovak citizens, although of Hungarian ethnic nationality. The Slovak Minister of Culture Jozef Bednár has issued a statement condemning Hungary for “intervening in the internal affairs of the Slovak Republic.” That does seem to be an accurate accusation, as far as it goes, although on the other hand it was also the standard line trotted out by the Soviet Union and its satellites whenever the West chose to complain about human rights violations and the like in those countries while the Cold War was still raging

Indeed, you could think that a bit of “interference in internal affairs” is quite in order here to stifle this childish and embarrassing brouhaha – intervention not from Hungary, but the European Union. Yet it seems that neither the doctrine concerning relations between EU institutions and member-states nor the sheer willingness of EU top officials to actually do anything has evolved sufficiently for that to happen.

Things really get interesting towards the end of the HN article when the author (the piece is attributed only to the Czech press agency CTK) introduces secondary information – like only entities registered as organizations or businesses are liable to the fine, not physical persons. Or the fact that no entity has actually been fined yet! If that’s really true, you can safely guess that the Language Law was really intended to be little more than a Slovak political gesture. Unfortunately, that gesture is kicking up more than a bit of trouble with the neighbors.

As those of us keeping track of such things know, the mild, non-binding agreement that emerged out of last month’s COP15 UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen was disappointing to many. Just imagine how much it fell short of the expectations of those island countries, like the Maldives, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea-levels global warming brings!

But now one of those island nations, the Federated States of Micronesia (that’s who you turn to for your “.fm” Internet domain), has found a novel way to do something about it. I first caught word of this from the Some Assembly Required blog, which provided a link to an article in the New York Times sourced to Reuters (so it must be true, eh?). There you can read all about it: The Micronesia government is trying to intervene to influence the re-commissioning of a coal-fired power plant – one located in Prunéřov, Czech Republic, or around 13,000 km away! It has expressed this intention in two official government-to-government letters, one sent last month (while the Copenhagen conference was going on, apparently), and the second (laying out the technical details of what it objects to in the plant) just last week.

I’ve been able to find Czech-press coverage of this rather extraordinary episode only in that country’s main business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny. But that coverage is pretty thorough. There is a main article, telling the story: Micronesia: Prunéřov is [just] one of a thousand power plants, but it still is damaging us. In addition HN has an exclusive interview in a second piece (conducted by an unnamed reporter) with Andrew Yatilman, Minister of the Environment for Micronesia (We are fighting for our lives, Prunéřov is just our first act, says Micronesian minister).

Actually, in contrast to the impression of cool rage that that headline might give you, you’re really struck much more in the interview by how ad hoc this effort is on the part of the Micronesian government – how they are feeling their way as they go along in this legal initiative without precedent. For instance, Greenpeace (as you might expect) has had a big influence in this whole thing: it was protests carried out in front of the Prunéřov plant in question by Czech Greenpeace activists last month that inspired the idea in the first place, and Greenpeace has cooperated closely with the Micronesian government in providing both legal and technical advice. Will you be trying this with other plants, other governments? asks the reporter. For sure, Yatilman replies, although only after this episode is over and we have a chance to learn from the experience. (Note well that Micronesia is not going so far as to demand that the Czech government shut down the plant, it is only asking to be included in the process for granting it approval to re-open, so it can insist on a range of anti-CO2 emission safeguards.) Are any other island nations ready to join you in these efforts? I don’t know yet, Yatilman replies.

The interview concludes with a bit of unwitting comedy, as the HN reporter inquires whether Minister Yatilman is aware of the attitudes towards global warming of the Czech President, Václav Klaus. He is not; HN informs him how Klaus denies that global warming even exists, that he’s one of the world’s most-prominent climate change deniers. “Good that you say that,” replies Yatilman,

because we got a letter from the Czech Republic that purported to be from the president. But we didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t written on any letterhead stationery and it tried to find out why we were doing what we are doing. As if we weren’t a sovereign state. Underneath was some signature, but whether it was from your president, I don’t know. In any case we didn’t take it seriously.

It’s all there in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Just months after rushing to order enough swine-flu vaccine to protect their citizens, European governments are canceling orders and trying to sell or give away extra doses as they sit on a glut of the vaccine.

The main reason: European health officials decided that only one shot per person was needed, instead of the two originally planned.

Actually, there may have been another reason, as announced in the headline of the Czech Republic’s largest-circulation mainstream paper Mladá fronta dnes: Expert: Swine flu pandemic is a swindle by the pharmaceutical companies.

That’s right, it is alleged their profits were not all that they should be, so the drug companies manufactured a crisis to pump up sales revenue by at least millions. But who is the “expert” making this claim? His name is Wolfgang Wodarg, and he is chairman of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. (Note: that has no direct connection to the European Union, it’s a completely separate – in fact, earlier – organization. I know, it’s confusing . . .) And it seems that that Parliamentary Assembly will debate this question later this month, so maybe we’ll hear more about it then and become better able to judge.

Fortunately, the MFD article cited another piece giving all the details in the UK’s Daily Mail, so you can read about them there. But it also links to an article it published itself (i.e. in the Czech paper MFD) last July, about how the prominent Czech politician (and former Minister for Health) David Rath was also of the opinion that swine flu was just some sort of fraud for the benefit of the drug companies.

UPDATE: And indeed, French president Sarkozy’s house-newspaper Le Figaro is now announcing that the swine-flu epidemic there (known as “H1N1″) is over, according to an organization of French doctors called Réseau [i.e. network] Sentinelles France. At the same time, the article’s author (mysteriously known only as “C.J.”) says that it’s still recommended that one get immunized – the disease “could know a rebound.”

I’ve had occasion recently to mention Switzerland, unfortunately in connection with that country supposedly “letting [itself] be pushed around.” I say “unfortunately” because such an assertion does not mix well with this other interesting article I’ve come across, by Adam Černý, in the main Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny: A troika of three women govern conservative Switzerland this year. No, I tell you that I do not want to make any connection of the one with the other!

In any event, it’s true: Doris Leuthard is now the Swiss president, while Erika Forster-Vanini is head of the upper chamber of the Swiss parliament and Pascale Bruderer is head of the lower. Even though Ms. Leuthard’s achievement should be seen in light of the Swiss practice of switching the presidency every year to a pre-determined member of the Federal Council, thus not by any election, it is nonetheless notable if only because the two previous women who have been Swiss president have been from the Left, of the Socialist Party. Ms. Leuthard is a Christian Democrat, the sort of right-wing German political formation more likely to feel that the age-old slogan Kinder, Küche, Kirche (“children, kitchen, church”) best encapsulates all that women should really worry their pretty little heads about.

The fact of three women now occupying the top Swiss governing functions is further striking because, as the HN headline notes, it’s a particularly conservative country. You might have heard how its citizens voted in November to forbid the building of minarets, and women there got the vote in the first place, on a country-wide basis, only in 1971. What is more, a full 30% of members of the Parliament are female. As Černý notes, that is a higher proportion than in the legislatures of the UK, France, Italy, and Austria. It may not be higher than the female-legislator rates in the Scandinavian countries, but there they employ quotas to boost their numbers from the distaff side, whereas the Swiss do not.

Hooray! Today’s the day that the Lisbon Treaty finally comes into effect in the European Union! As a result, the Union’s operations will from now on supposdly be more transparent, more effective, and more democratic. Those, at least, are the three elements that made up the principal content of the Laeken Declaration issued by EU leaders at their summit in December, 2001, in which they noted how the actual operation and accomplishments of the Union had become disappointing to so many, and so called for the setting-up of a convention to consider what could be done about that.

Inevitably, there remain many within the boundaries of the EU who go beyond mere disappointment to an outright rejection of that process that began at Laeken (that’s in Belgium, by the way) and ended up, through many twists and turns that included a rejected EU Constitution, with the Lisbon Treaty. Most prominent in this regard are the Czechs, if only because Czech president Václav Klaus was the last obstacle to the ratification of that treaty, holding out until only one month ago. Klaus was finally forced to knuckle under, but Czech anti-Lisbon opinion will not let this day pass without at least one more loud cry of protest. Thus it is that we get this article in today’s on-line edition of the Czech daily Lidové noviny. (Those signs brandished in the photo up top read “We want a Europe of free nations” and “We don’t want EU vetoes/prohibitions”; and the Czech word “dost” that’s also there simply means “enough.”)

That this sort of piece should appear on lidovky.cz is no surprise, since that newspaper – otherwise quite a mainline Czech broadsheet worth recommending, by the way – has through the years consistently provided a platform for the writings of Václav Klaus, whether in or out of power. This time it’s not Klaus himself who wrote the article – he’s still president, after all, so that would truly be rather too awkward – but instead one Michal Petřík, an advisor to President Klaus. (more…)

Oh joy! Longer-term €S readers will remember all the way back to May, when I first brought you word in this space about the “Miss Saudi Arabia” pageant. Due to the . . . er . . . somewhat different nature of that extravaganza’s judging-process, it takes rather longer than your average beauty pageant. But now this year’s winner has finally been crowned, and that is eighteen-year-old Aya Ali Mulla. I had not really been on the look-out for any sort of follow-up to May’s story – I promise! – but my RSS feeds nonetheless came up for me big-time and alerted me to recent coverage of that pageant’s outcome from the Czech press, namely from Lidové noviny and Mladá fronta dnes. These articles are (almost) the same, as they both are by-lined to the same Czech press agency piece. For example, they have similar headlines: “Saudi Arabia has new Miss, but no one has seen her” and “Miss Saudi Arabia’s face seen only by female jury-members,” respectively.

Naturally, both Czech papers ultimately refer back to the Saudi press for coverage of this marquee event, but have to report that no Saudi paper was actually able to state what it was about Ms. Mulla* that catapulted her to victory. It was easier just to report what she won: an amount in riyals that, from the Czech-crown equivalent that is cited, seems to be just under €1,000; a pearl necklace; some diamonds (mounted on what, is not revealed); a wristwatch; and a paid vacation to Malaysia, which, although of course another Islamic land, is a pretty nice place to visit, I’ve heard. There’s also further detail here on one of the event’s key competitions, the “How much do you respect your mother?” event: apparently contestants each spend an entire day out “in the country” with their own mother, under the observation of one of the jury-members (wielding a clipboard, no doubt). I say, get coverage of that on the X-Games channel, pronto!

The Czech papers are able to contribute some added detail, perhaps somewhat wistfully, about another beauty pageant held in the Arab world that does actually conform a bit more tightly to what most of the rest of the world understands by the concept, namely the one for Miss Lebanon, where the girls do actually appear in swimsuits (one-piece only, though) and in evening gowns, and are interviewed in front of an audience. In contrast, returning again to Saudi Arabia, the LN article states “Beauty competitions there only have to do with goats, sheep, camels, and other animals” – despite the considerable effort required each year to get the camels into their one-piece bathing-suits!

[Cymbal crash] No, that last part I made up myself . . .

*Quite a suitable name, eh? No, I’m not making it up, click through above to the articles and see for yourself if you want. But don’t be fooled when you see the winner’s last name as “Mullaová”: that last “-ová” part is added routinely in Czech, Slovak, and some other Slavic languages to women’s last names.

I was at first going to add this to Hillary Clinton’s dossier of insults to hurl back at the North Korean authorities – but all joking here needs to be put to one side, this is much too serious and horrible. According to reports from escaped North Korean refugees, that totalitarian government actually takes mentally- and physically-handicapped children away from their parents for use as expendable human guinea pigs for testing involving the country’s stock of chemical and biological weapons, including experiments designed to find out how and how long it takes to die from exposure to them.

I first saw word about this from an on-line article of the Czech daily Lidové noviny (North Korea tests weapons on handicapped children, claim refugees), but that article in turn refers to a report by the Arabic TV network Al-Jazeera, which you can read in English here. A quote from one defector: “If you are born mentally or physically deficient, the government says your best contribution to society . . . is as a guinea pig for biological and chemical weapons testing.” As they say, Dulce et decorum est . . .

While I appreciate Petr Pešek’s item there in LN for spreading the word more widely about this – which indeed is my own intended function here, although I daresay my circulation is somewhat smaller than LN’s – I can assure you that it includes little that you can’t read in English over at Al-Jazeera. (All I could find was an additional reference Pešek makes to how it has already been known that North Korea was willing to sacrifice prisoners for these purposes.) Note however that he is notably more journalistically cautious, scattering his piece thickly with “alleged” (údajný) and “it is said” (prý) and pointed references to the Al-Jazeera account.

If you’re into peer-to-peer downloading of large files (e.g. movies, music) from the Internet, you know already know all about it; if you’re not, here’s a quick summary. The most popular program for doing so is called BitTorrent, and for quite some time The Pirate Bay, a site based in Sweden, was the most popular place to go to get the files you might be interested in (you know, like Hollywood movies still in general public release – or even yet to embark upon public release). Naturally, The Pirate Bay came under some considerable legal pressure for its activities, until this past spring the main personnel behind it were sentenced to jail and to the payment of a hefty SEK 30 million fine. (They are appealing the verdict.) In the meantime, the Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB has announced its intention to buy The Pirate Bay next month and give it a “new business model” that makes the site’s activities strictly legal. In the meantime, though, some of the people behind The Pirate Bay have formed The Pirate Party – with chapters not just in Sweden but other countries as well – to advance their free-file-sharing political views, which already won one seat in the European Parliament in the early-June elections.

The (eventual) metamorphosis of The Pirate Bay to legality is especially good news for the French government, which has been busy since the beginning of the year trying to come up with legal measures to pass to outlaw the sort of free downloading of copyrighted commercial material that The Pirate Bay did so much to facilitate. After modifying their legislation to meet the objections from France’s Constitutional Court, which had first thrown it out, the French Senate has recently passed it, so that it is close to becoming law. It would empower a state agency – called Hadopi – to detect this sort of activity and, if two warnings to desist are ignored, pass on to French judges information about the offense for them to assign penalties, including fines, jail, and disconnection from the Net.

Ah, but can anyone ever stop truly determined Internet “pirates”? Le Monde reporter Maël Inizan now reports on another site now arising like a phoenix from The Pirate Bay’s ashes to save the cause of free downloading (Illegal downloading: a new site takes up the torch of The Pirate Bay). (more…)

It’s summer now, tourist season – and maybe some of you are even dietary wayfarers, perennially off (when you get some vacation time) in search of new and interesting culinary experiences. Perhaps you have already sampled the renowned horseburger served up at the Hot Horse burger-stands in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, a country where horsemeat is a normal part of the national culinary culture. Myself, I’m no sort of dietary tourist, but I’ve done that; I can recommend it, and the delightful city of Ljubljana generally.

Now the Czech daily Lidové noviny brings word today of a new gastronomic challenge along this line: camelburgers! A fast-food restaurant in Saudi Arabia’s own capital, Riyadh, is now offering its customers hamburgers made from camel-meat, and owner Saleh Kuvaisi is happy to explain to the press why he thinks this will be a big hit. “It’s all about the love people here have for camel meat,” he declares, and indeed the article notes that upper-scale restaurants in the Kingdom have long offered their customers camel “delicacies” (pochoutky) such as livers. Still, the article does give the impression that this rather has more to do with the regard Saudis have for camels per se, namely as fond tokens of the Bedouin existence from the good old days that they harken back to as the origin of their Arab culture, even as at present they are much more likely to get around in some sort of Toyota pick-up.

In any event, camel burger (that is, ground camel-meat), is still something new, but you wonder how it is that nobody ever thought of it before. The meat is said to be particularly low in fat compared to other animals (the same goes for camel milk, by the way); one camelburger customer is quoted in the article as approvingly noting that aspect and also praising the meat’s “refined taste.” And a certain Walid Sanchez, who according to the article runs a popular Internet guide to Saudi Arabian restaurants*, asserts to the reporter that camelburgers are bound to be popular, because Saudis generally are open to new things gastronomic – but then again, of course they will like them all the better if these things have local origins.

There you have it, then, another gourmet experience to put on your personal bucket list. This one might pose a particular challenge, though: there’s no such thing as a tourist visa to Saudi Arabia, you either need to be a Muslim going there on pilgrimage to Mecca or else have some other practical reason to be allowed inside the Kingdom – and I don’t think “having a camelburger at Saleh’s joint” will cut it!

* I have to note with disapproval here that this LN article mentioned Sanchez and his website, but only generically and without providing the URL; that I had to go find for you, dear readers, using the power of Google.