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.

Petitions for Putin? you might ask. Actually, no: petitions for one Dmitry Mezencev, currently governor of the Irkutsk region, in far-east Siberia, to enable him to get on the presidential ballot to oppose Putin. Now, how can that make sense? Simple: Russian law unfortunately decrees that no presidential election is valid unless there are at least two qualified candidates running for that office. That means that, even if the opposition could sponsor someone to oppose Putin, they could then turn around and use that candidate’s withdrawal from the race as a threat or weapon to invalidate the results.

So Putin needs some “insurance,” in the form of another candidate who can be called up in time to function as the required opponent. (Not to win, though, by any stretch of the imagination; and the piece assures us that Mezencev is a loyal Putin-man.) But you just can’t announce that you are running for Russian president, as many opposition figures have found out in the past to their cost – you have to be able to show two million valid signatures on petitions for your candidacy, if you are candidate not backed by any party represented in the Duma. Oh-so-many opposition presidential candidates have been dismissed from participation in past presidential elections for allegedly failing to meet this standard.

No time like the present, then, to start getting those petitions ready in case Mezencev needs to be called into action. The article describes how some investigators, including one female reporter from the one-remaining independent Russian radio station, Echo Moscow, easily uncovered petition-fabrication operations happening in lecture-halls of Moscow universities. They were so brazen that there were no guards or security of any kind (until later, when the occupants discovered who was visiting them) as not only students but also pensioners and anyone else in need of some extra money sat filling in names and official ID card numbers into the forms. Not signatures, mind you – that would have been illegal since of course the signatures would not be their own (although the other information was no more their own), but those can presumably be taken care of later, somewhere with a bit better security.

And of course those “visitors” have it on video, here, on something called “Rutube.” Don’t worry: I looked at it myself, it’s not a virus-site or anything like that, it’s just rather remarkable to see the cameraman walk through the lecture-hall where the people are all hard at work at electoral fraud, where he even raises a few of the bogus forms up to the camera-lens.

                          

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

That link leads to an article from the leading Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes, with at its head a picture of Czech President Václav Klaus at the podium, with to the side a copy of the book he just had published, entitled European integration without illusions. Clearly, he is delighted to stand on the British side of the current Brussels developments. The article notes it is only the ČSSD – the main party now in opposition – that is worried about the Czech Republic isolating itself with this stance within the EU.

And there is also Denmark, with an even stronger history of setting definite limits to the sovereignty its government is willing to give up to the EU. As an article in the Kristeligt Dagblad notes, the new Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt needs to be careful to avoid a hostile homecoming from this summit by not giving much away. The unicameral parliament there – the Folketing – is very much divided about what is going on now in Brussels. Many of its constituent parties intend to demand a referendum if there is any significant change to Denmark’s position with the EU promised there.

Perhaps the best conclusion to draw is that Cameron – with his protuberant finger – simply was best-prepared (by temperament perhaps, but also by the very nature of the UK political system) to resist these German/French proposals which after all had been telegraphed well in advance. Several other countries might be alleging a need to return back to their countries to “consult” before they can really make up their mind, but the sort of decisions that will be made back there are in many cases already quite evident, and will ultimately not support any theme of British isolation.

UPDATE: What’d I say?

EU treaty problems? Cameron is not alone. http://t.co/JEjsgdAI

December 14, 2011 12:52 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftbrusselsblog

FT’s Brussels blog

Click through to access an excellent article from the FT’s Brussels Blog showing that the latest EU treaty agreed to “26-to-1″ at that last summit faces real problems not just in the UK, but in other EU member-states as well – Czech Republic and Denmark, yes, but also others.

                          

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.

                          

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?

                          

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.

The result according to the Czech paper has been a recent series of extraordinary conference-calls, at one point simultaneously featuring German Chancellor Merkel, French President Sarkozy, Spanish premier Zapatero, Italian premier Berlusconi, and British PM David Cameron all on the line, with US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also allowed to listen in. Afterwards, it is reported here, they all called President Obama for good measure.

We’ll see what they came up with from any official announcements during the rest of this weekend, and then of course get market reaction starting from the Asian opening late Sunday night/early Monday morning (European time). But one thing these conversations are said to have produced was a pledge by Berlusconi to balance the Italian budget a year ahead of schedule, in 2013, and even to put a balanced budget amendent into the Italian constitution. (At least that is how I interpret the key phrase here ústavního dodatku, although ústavní can mean merely “institutional” in addition to “constitutional.”) If such an ironclad balanced-budget imperative would be a foolish move for the US – which everyone agrees it would be – how can it make any more sense for Italy?

                          

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.

                          

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?

                          

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.

Strictly speaking, the label “Czechoslovak Legions” also applies to units on the Western Front in France, and elsewhere, made up of Czechs and Slovaks willing to fight for the Allied (i.e. Britain, France, USA) cause in exchange for getting the right to ask for their own country after the fighting stopped. But that label is mostly interpreted as referring to the “legion” with the most spectacular escapades, namely those units fighting for the Russians – since in 1917, that Russian government for which they were fighting ceased to exist. The legions then chose to fight against the Communist regime that replaced it late that year, meaning they were heavily involved in the cause of the so-called “Whites” in the Russian Civil War. The “Whites” lost, of course, but the Czechoslovak Legion held itself together the whole time, and actually managed to make its way all the way across Asia to Vladivostok – traveling mainly by rail, it must be admitted, although it’s also maintained that they were also transporting the Czar’s gold-treasure with them (and that gets heavy!) – and thence thousands of miles more by ship to a long-delayed homecoming to what in fact had in the meantime become an independent Czechoslovakia.

It was an epic adventure, and there’s little doubt that these soldiers’ efforts did contribute substantially towards the inclination of Western political leaders at the Paris Peace Conference to give them their brand-new state. On the other hand, they did fight the Communists, meaning that when their country was under Communist rule from 1948 until 1989 any recognition of their feats, or honor shown to surviving veterans, was taboo. That was all OK again after the Velvet Revolution, though, and today there’s a commemorative statue to the Legionnaires standing in Palacky Square located in downtown Prague on the east bank of the Vltava river.

So much for that. But now the Czech Defense Ministry has a new project called Legie 100 (“Legion 100″), intended to honor the Legions further as the 100th anniversary of their exploits approaches. It wants a proper museum, or else a commemorative train; it wants further monies for the maintenance of legionnaires’ graves, it even wants to make a film.

Sorry, Cant’ Afford It

In short, it wants Kč 600 million (€150 million) – but, as is the case most everywhere in the West these days, that sort of money is not just lying around. Quite the opposite, in fact: contemporary Czech politics is currently preoccupied not with the Legion, but with the struggle to finance ordinary government operations (plus a fresh attempt to put public pensions on a more-solid basis). In particular, the Czech government is now blazing new fiscal ground by proposing the abolition of the “reduced rate” value-added tax rate of 10% so that everything that is taxed at all when bought and sold is subject to the “high” rate of 20% – food, books, baby’s booties, you name it.

Even if you don’t follow Czech politics at all, that sort of proposal should be enough to convince you that the Gzech government feels itself in dire need of more tax revenues – meaning, on the other side, it’s not going to be very receptive to any new spending proposals. The Legionnaires – or rather, those who wish to honor their memory, since there are very few actual Legionnaires still alive – might just be out of luck. No less than the Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, has felt the need to put in his two-crowns’ worth: “The Legionnaires definitely had their significance, [but] that amount I regard as extravagant. We have problems that probably weigh on us more.”*

If the story of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires appeals to you, it’s likely you’ll have to be satisfied with setting a Google Alert for the private fujd-raising appeal for Legie 100 that will surely come soon. Also, the next time you visit Prague, do pay a visit to Palacky Square – it’s near a major tram-line intersection!

* If you’re now thinking “What business does the Foreign Minister have in making pronouncements about a domestic budget question?” then our two great minds do think alike. But there’s another angle: Schwarzenberg is actually Prince Schwarzenberg, with a personal family history that goes way back to the German-speaking nobility of the Austrian Empire. It’s even likely that, secretly, he dismisses the Legionnaires as having been no better than traitors to the Austrian cause!

                          

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.”

                          

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!