If this is Saturday, and you’re the American president, then that countryside you see down below, outside of the windows of Air Force One, must be the Czech Republic. Yes, today Obama and entourage flies on to Prague, and Dan Bilefsky in the New York Times already has the details about how he has the tricky task before him of visiting a country’s capital while taking care to have very little to do with top leaders of the government there – and pulling all this off without seeming impolite or ungrateful for the hospitality. The first trick involves invoking a presidential desire for a night off in scenic Prague, to grab the chance for an intimate dinner with Michelle at a “secret location,” in order to avoid any extended encounter-over-a-meal with either Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek (who publicly labeled Obama’s domestic budget plans a “road to hell”* only a few days ago; is a rather stolid, apparatchik-type guy anyway; speaks little English – and, most vitally, is now but a “caretaker” prime minister after his government fell this past week) or President Václav Klaus (speaks excellent English, now is in whip-hand position to determine composition of the next Czech government – but who could also bring on an attack of extreme presidential indigestion, no matter how excellent the food served, with his outspoken and negative opinions about the EU and climate change; for more about this in English, from the Economist, see here). (more…)

It’s Friday, 3 April – do you know where your American president is? I’ll give you a clue: today he is generally in the area of the French/German border where it is demarcated by the Rhine: in Germany at Baden-Baden and a village called Kehl, but mainly at French Strasbourg for a combined NATO summit and celebration of that alliance’s 60th anniversary. That organization may even get a new secretary-general as a result of this gathering; current Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the favorite to the Dutch Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who has held that position for five years now.

Amid all the honor-guard reviews, meetings, and celebrations one prominent voice calls out forlornly from the sideline, like a jilted past lover of the bridegroom at a wedding. It belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, and a man highly “involved” (at least in terms of the measures he did not take) in the wave of revolutions in 1989-90 that took Eastern Europe out of the Soviet bloc. Both the Financial Times Deutschland (Gorbachev criticizes NATO expansion; no by-line) and the Czech daily Lidové noviny (NATO decieved the Russians, Gorbachev maintains, article by Petra Procházková) are now carrying reports of recent remarks he made to German media outlets accusing the West of breaking certain promises that were made to his government back at the time of German reunification in 1990. (more…)

The post-1989 Czechoslovak/Czech governmental system is a parliamentary one, with a (mostly) ceremonial president as head-of-state, and so there occurred yesterday in Prague that system’s occasional occupational hazard: the current government, headed by Premier Mirek Topolánek, was voted out in a vote of no-confidence. Topolánek’s coalition government had always existed with just a bare majority in the Czech chamber of deputies (lower house), made from three different parties, willing to support it, and this time it was apparently the defection of four such deputies from his own ODS party that sealed the government’s fate.

Of course, under ordinary circumstances few of us outside of the Czech Republic would care: the Czechs could just be left alone, as usual, to go forward under the terms of their constitution and find themselves a new government. And indeed, there was no mention of these events in Prague when I checked this morning (Central European Time) at the New York Times, the Times of London, or the Guardian, although the Washington Post did have a report. But these are not normal circumstances, among other reasons because the Czechs currently hold the presidency of the European Union. In fact this is a very bad time for such a thing to happen, for at least two reasons: (more…)

Need a little bit of good recession-related news? Maybe even something with “rejoice” in the title? We get that from the mainstream Czech daily Lidové noviny, reporting on recent Škoda auto sales: Germans fall in love with the Fabia, Škoda rejoices. Yes, Škoda’s Fabia (pictured here) was the second-most-sold automobile in the German market in February, 2009, behind only that perennial favorite the VW Golf. At 9,190 units sold, Fabia sales were triple what they had been only the previous month, while sales of the Octavia also improved enough to push that sister Škoda model (more of a luxury auto, I believe) to 19th place on the auto-sales hit-parade of what is of course a very competitive German market. One important result of all of this is that Škoda has cancelled the plans it had to go to a four-day work-week until the end of June; the five-day work-week (meaning five-day pay for personnel) will stay. (more…)

All visitors to Prague will eventually encounter Vítkov Hill (pictured here), which forms one part of the boundary between Prague 8 (Karlín, on the south bank of the Vltava river, to the left side here) and Prague 3 (Žižkov). You can’t miss it because 1) It’s a massive, stand-alone hill near the center of town covered almost entirely by trees, and 2) At its western end (that is, closest to the city center, that we can see here), it features a massive equestrian statue – the largest in the world – of Jan Žižka, the one-eyed general of the Hussite Wars.
Just beyond that statue is another gigantic building, the National Mausoleum, intended to be the resting- (and exhibition-) place for the remains of Czechoslovakia’s leadership throughout the glorious thousand-year epoch of Communist brotherhood that was supposed to have been inaugurated by the coup d’état in Prague culminating on 25 February 1948. Much like Lenin in Red Square, the mummified body of the leader of that coup , Klement Gottwald, was in fact exhibited at the National Mausoleum from shortly after his death in March, 1953, until 1962 – when it had reached such an advanced state of decay due to the mishandled mummification process that it had to be cremated.
To the outside observer, there is an important clue there in the gaping contrast between the ostentatious facilities built to celebrate Gottwald’s legacy and the ultimate messy disposal of his remains – although the Czechs themselves long ago dismissed him as merely a stooge for Stalin, affording him little to no respect (unless required to by their position) even back when he was the country’s president. Now, just after the commemoration of the 61st anniversary of that coup, comes an article in the largest-circulation Czech broadsheet newspaper Mladá fronta dnes disclosing that things were even worse than most Czechs had assumed: for most of his presidency, Gottwald was in fact a serious alcoholic completely incapable of carrying out his presidential functions. (more…)

Prince Harry, third-in-line to the British throne, is going back to school. His record of non-PC utterances that have escaped to public scrutiny has now lengthened to the point that a place has been hastily reserved for him in the British Army’s “Equality and Diversity” course, designed to instill in its students some sort of self-restraint for when they otherwise might be tempted to use insensitive language when referring to (or addressing directly, for that matter) minority groups.

As you might expect, amused coverage of this latest stage in the young prince’s education can be found in a number of Europe’s on-line papers. I sort of like best, though, the treatment in the Czech Republic’s widest-circulation mainstream daily, Mladá fronta dnes (Prince Harry gains himself a behavior-course for his racist utterances). If you want to click on that link you can see one reason why right away: the photo there shows the prince on duty in Afghanistan, to be sure, but he’s revving through the desert on a motorcycle (wearing no helmet, naturally – but that’s just the old fart in me speaking), in front of two heavily-laden personnel-carriers and a couple of his soldier-mates who presumably must content themselves with such steerage-class transportation. Let me add now a couple more observations based upon having had the same sort of experience (i.e. deployed in wartime to the desert with armored vehicles) in my own life: what with the red coloring and what seems to be an abundance of other shiny metal, that motorcycle is for sure not “tactical,” i.e. does not belong in an environment where other people, somewhere out there, are authorized to shoot you and your companions if they can just find you, aim, and fire. Also, Harry lives fully up to his name (and I don’t mean “Windsor,” he’s not wearing a tie): the officer that I was back during my own desert deployment (1991) would immediately send him straight off to some sergeant to get a proper military haircut.

But the MFD article is a winner in a couple other ways, too. It turns out that this will in fact be the second time Harry is sent to such a course; the article notes that “the present course should however be more intensive.” And one’s curiosity is satisfied here about just how it is that you say “Paki” and “black guy” in Czech. (Respectively, it’s Pakoše and černouš; the latter stems from Harry’s remark of a few months ago to British comedian Stephen Amos, “You don’t sound like a black chap.”)

For the record, EuroSavant is much more on Harry’s case for his evident tactical shortcomings, as newly-revealed in this Profimedia.cz photo, than his remarks, which actually seem a certain cut above what we were used to hearing from fellow British and American officers back-in-the-day. But he’s a royal, a British state employee of a very unique sort, so he can’t be allowed to talk like any other 24-year-old British Army officer would be naturally inclined to speak.

The Czech daily Lidové noviny devoted an entire article yesterday (Miracle in Australia) to Sam the koala, who somehow emerged alive out of the devastating forest fires currently ravaging south-east (i.e. the most heavily-populated part of) Australia. The piece (by-lined to the Czech news agency ČTK) begins:

The little koala bear has become a symbol of the tragic fires in Australia. The entire continent has experienced the story of his rescue. The bewildered and heavily injured koala which emerged from the ashes of the Australian bush is only a small flash of hope after the days of devastation and the loss of more than 180 human lives.

The article includes an embedded YouTube video of volunteer fireman Dave Tree approaching Sam and getting him to drink some water out of a plastic bottle. (Understand that Sam did not introduce himself as such at the time – he was in no mood for such pleasantries – but was bestowed with that name after he was transferred to a near-by animal care center.)

UPDATE: I should have known that that YouTube video with Sam the koala and fireman Dave would turn out to be a worldwide hit, so that you hardly need to go to Lidové noviny’s pages anymore to access it. I’ve already seen it, among other places, on the Washington Post’s website.

The funniest sort of scandal erupted this past week in Brussels, in connection with the brand-new (and first-time) Czech presidency of the European Union. Have you heard of this? The New York Times has its account here. It had to do with a huge sculpture that the Czech government commissioned for erection at the building that houses the European Council, one that – as you would expect – was supposed to reflect in some way upon on the EU and its member-states. But the Czechs made a key mistake in entrusting the task to the (Czech) artist David Černý. As the sculpture was set up over the weekend, for completion by Monday, it soon became clear that there was something very wrong; by the time the dedication ceremony was supposed to happen on Thursday, yesterday (and it did), controversy was flying thick and fast.

What were the Czech authorities in charge of EU relations thinking? Černý, after all (whose last name simply means “black”), has always been notorious, it’s accurate to say, rather than just “famous” within the Czech cultural world, bursting onto that scene in 1991 by painting the tank constituting a Soviet war-memorial in Prague a shocking pink color in one daring night-time raid. Although he was briefly arrested for that, that pink tank became a metaphor for the wacky, world-turned-upside down ambiance of the Czech Republic, and Prague in particular, in the years immediately after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution.” Barely pausing to catch his breath, Černý went on to produce a series of additional eye-catching works of sculpture, a few of which you can appreciate on his Wikipedia page. Those “tower babies,” for example: you can pick them out crawling all over the gigantic TV tower, itself located in the Prague 3 district, from much of the rest of the city. And that “riding a dead horse” statue is mighty big and impressive in its own right – look for it at the internal shopping-and-movie-theater-area located within the Lucerna building at the corner of Wenceslas Square and Vodičkova Street (a magnificent building once owned by Václav Havel himself, built by his father – also named Václav Havel). (more…)

Hungry for some sort of financial news now, at the beginning of a brand-new year, that’s actually good, that reflects things flawlessly going ahead according to plan? How about this: As of 1 JAN 2009 Slovakia adopted the euro as its currency, just as the European Central Bank (ECB) and various other responsible Euro-authorities had authorized it to do last May. That’s right: Slovakia – I mean, who even knows where that place is? It was only a separate country as of 1 JAN 1993, yet it has beaten out (among others) its former big-brother state, the Czech Republic (which could be said to date back to Greater Moravia of 833 AD if you’re willing to stretch the affiliations a little bit), and Poland (dating from 966 AD) to the safe-haven of the euro. And make no mistake: these days the euro-zone is definitely the sort of currency safe-haven that all sorts of countries still standing outside it (e.g. Poland, Denmark, Iceland) wish that they were within, given the demonstrated weakness of numerous small-state-currency regimes.

Against this background, it’s amusing to take a look at comments from the Czech press. (more…)

So how are you going to spend your upcoming Christmas holidays? Curled up with a stack of books? Yes, it’s true that Xmas customs vary widely from culture to culture, but if you’re Czech it seems pretty likely that that’s exactly what you have planned, if we can go by an interview just published in Mladá fronta dnes (If Czech, then book-lover: According to survey Czechs are among the most-active readers).

The interview is with Prof. Jirí Trávnícek of Prague’s Charles Univerity, who was heavily involved with a recent survey about Czech reading habits carried out jointly by the (Czech) National Library and the Institute for Czech Literature of the (Czech) Academy of Sciences. And sure enough, that survey (termed the “most extensive so far” even as the good professor reveals towards the interview’s end that the sample was but 1,500 people) shows that the Czechs are among the top readers in the European Union, and indeed in the entire world. (more…)

Oh joy! In Russia government authorities have now submitted a law to the Duma (parliament) designed to re-define the legal definition of treason. Up to now that has been defined simply as “activities carried out with the aim of damaging internal security,” but the Kremlin proposes to change that to “any act carried out with the intention of threatening the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional order, sovereignty, and territorial and state integrity.” This news comes from the Czechs, who have a considerable stock of their own of both experience with the Russians and of laws equating opposing the State to treason. Specifically, it comes from an article in the largest-circulation non-tabloid daily, Mladá fronta dnes: Kremlin wants law to forbid criticism of state. (The article has multiple references to a treatment of the issue in the London Times, but all that I found on-line was this, which covers the separate issue of a recently-approved bill in the Duma that ended trial-by-jury for terror and treason cases.)

The important thing to note here is that, while this is so far only a legislative proposal, it is certain to become Russian law, given how packed the Duma is (two-thirds) with supporters of the Government, specifically with members of the ruling United Russia party. But it goes even further, also outlawing any provision of financial, material, or technical aid or advice to “suspicious” foreign organizations. What makes a foreign organization “suspicious”? When it is after state secrets. In practice, this means that Russian citizens can get in trouble even for talking with foreigners, and certainly for contacting any outside journalists.

As cherry-on-the-top, the Mladá fronta dnes article features some comments on those who would be “traitors” to the Russian state from Andrei Lugovoy. He’s the one, you might recall, whom Scotland Yard strongly suspects to be the killer (by radioactive polonium 210) of the anti-Putin KGB renegade Alexander Litvinenko, but whom Russia refuses to extradite to the UK. With his legal safety extra-protected by his status as Duma representative, Lugovoy feels no particular reason to shut up, and the article quotes him telling the Spanish newspaper El País that, if it were up to him, “traitors” would simply be executed: “If someone caused serious damage to the Russian state, he should be disposed of.”

Tired of all the US election news? (“Obama, McCain, Obama, Palin, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi . . .” and on and on.) Well, today is the day before Election Day 2008: here at EuroSavant I just can’t stop now – and you can be quite sure that I’ll be monitoring foreign coverage of the results later this week as well. Just be patient, all of this will soon pass . . .

In the meantime, you have the occasional foreign article about the US elections that you rather wish did not have to be there, like what we see today in the main Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes: You’ll be arrested at the polls, leaflets mislead American voters. The lede:

In the last hours before the presidential elections American voters are being flooded with dirty tricks. Misleading e-mails go to Americans, disquieting telephone calls occur, and people find under their doors slanderous pamphlets. Their purpose is to dissuade people from voting, to mislead and confuse them. A part of these tricks this year have a racist flavor due to Barack Obama’s dark skin.

The article (no by-line given) proceeds to give a pretty good list of the various don’t-get-out-the-vote schemes that have been uncovered so far; some of them I hadn’t even heard of yet. (more…)

Back to the subject of Iceland, which holds the doubtful distinction of occupying the current financial crisis’ leading-edge of economic suffering. As the FT recently reported, that country’s monetary authorities have now had to raise interest rates for the Icelandic krona to a record 18% as one condition for receiving what is still a “proposed” $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The future will seemingly bring a 10% contraction of the economy there, with simultaneous 8% unemployment and 20%-plus inflation.

I’m afraid I do not possess the skills in Icelandic to start investigating that country’s on-line press to look deeper into this mess that way. But there’s at least some interesting coverage from the Czech Republic’s leading general-interest quality daily, Mladá fronta dnes, in the form of an article Alarmed by the crisis, a third of Icelanders consider moving out of the country. (more…)

Word comes here from Hospodárské noviny, the Czech Republic’s leading business newspaper, that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has found herself to be poorly served – poorly served indeed! – lately by her government’s financial ministers, to her considerable and personal cost. HN’s article (no by-line) reports that the value of Queen’s stock market holdings has recently plunged by 37% “in the past days.” That corresponds to a value lost of 1.2 billion – but fans of the Queen should not freak out too much, since that’s 1.2 billion in Czech crowns, corresponding these days to around £37 million. It’s still a considerable sum, though, I have to admit.

And why is this being reported in a Czech, rather than a British newspaper? Well, the HN report does cite as its source the Daily Express. But I could not find anything on this subject on its site, even by entering “Elizabeth II” in that search-box up-top there. (Yes, I did subsequently click on the “SEARCH” button over there on the right. Nada.)

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday, speaking of the recent Russian actions in Georgia, that “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” Examining her words carefully, one could conclude that her point is essentially that Russia is attempting a repeat of what it accomplished with its Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia – exactly forty years ago this month, as it happens – but should not be able or allowed to succeed this time.

But are the two military undertakings, separated by four decades, really comparable? You could ask the Czechs themselves about that. (more…)

First of all, here’s confirmation of the point James Fallows made on his Atlantic Monthly weblog, namely that Chinese Olympic officials pre-recorded the spectacular chain-of-exploding-fireworks display that allegedly happened during the Olympics’ opening ceremony last Friday. From the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny we have an account (A Small Chinese Deception) of how it’s even true that some of those sensational explosion effects did not even actually happen, but were merely animation effects of the sort you would expect out of an animated movie from DreamWorks. That much Wang Wei, vice-chairman of the Beijing Olympic Committee admitted today to reporters. Incidentally, the caption to the one picture accompanying the article at the top, showing the Olympic flame, speculates “Perhaps the lighting of the Olympic flame was also only from a recording.” (more…)

Can’t get enough of Indiana Jones? Well, I have good news, straight from France’s Le Figaro: Indiana Jones Nr. 5 Is On Its Way! “George Lucas confirms that another installment of the saga of the celebrated archeologist is going to be worked on,” the newspaper’s Olivier Delcroix reports. And indeed why not, as Delcroix goes on to report that the previous entry in this series, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has earned $750 million so far since its release in May.

Still, keep in mind that things are still at the rather vague stage. This news ultimately comes from remarks Lucas made to the London Sunday Times, in an interview to be published tomorrow, in which he states “If Steven [Spielberg] and I find a good idea that we love, we will do another.” (more…)

Oops, he did it again: At a press conference last Monday, John McCain made reference to the Russian government cutting off energy supplies to “Czechoslovakia,” a country that has not actually existed since it split apart into the Czech Republic and Slovakia as of 1 January 1993. And it’s not like that was the first time he has made this mistake.

No, not at all – and you can be sure that the Czechs themselves are watching closely and keeping track, as we can gather from today’s article on the website of the Czech Republic’s leading general interest newspaper, Mladá fronta dnes (Even after 15 Years the World Confuses Czechs with Slovaks, Chechens, and Chess-Players). In fact, author Jan Wirnitzer crowns the presumed Republican presidential candidate with the “Greatest Endurance in Repeating a Mistake” award, recounting how he also mistakenly spoke of Czechoslovakia in his first presidential campaign of eight years ago, and then also three months ago. (more…)

Austerlitz: the very name is covered in glory for the French, as well as for anyone else with any knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars. For it was on this Central European battlefield in 1805 (a little less than two months after the sea Battle of Trafalgar, as it happened) that Napoleon Bonaparte faced down the combined armies of two great empires – the Austrian and the Russian – and beat them bloodily and decisively in a battle regarded as a tactical masterpiece. In the aftermath the Austrian Emperor Francis would sue for peace, acknowledging France’s previous conquests in Italy and Germany; what was left of the Russian army would be permitted to scurry back on home; and Prussia (non-participating) somehow would become annoyed enough with this result to shortly go to war against Napoleon itself (bad move). In today’s Paris you will find a Gare (i.e. train station), a Quai (i.e. embankment), a Pont (i.e. bridge), a Rue (i.e. street), a Port and a Villa d’Austerlitz – despite the name itself being about as un-French-sounding as you can get while still staying within the Roman alphabet.

In fact it’s a German name, of course, because back in those days of the very early 19th century German culture and the German language were dominant over Central Europe, as they had been since the Thirty Years’ War, and the major city outside of which the battle was fought was known as Brünn. (more…)

Followers of European football’s Champions League will be aware of the hard assignment awaiting the Italian club A.S. Roma next Wednesday. Having lost to English Premier League leaders Manchester United 2-0 at home last Tuesday, Roma – because of the away-goals rule – need to go to Manchester and score at least three goals with no reply (or four goals if Man. United score one, etc.) to go on to the Champions League semi-finals.

It’s going to be tough, but the club at least has gotten a helping hand from one of its more rabid fans, the Italian actress Sabrina Ferilli. As the Czech News Agency ČTK reports in the daily Lidové noviny (For Progressing the A.S. Roma Footballers Are Promised a Strip-Tease), Ferilli has promised to take her clothes off for the delectation of Roma’s players – and their other fans – if the team beats Man. United sufficiently to make it through to the next round. And while the article notes towards its very beginning that Ferilli is now 43 years of age, the embedded video profile (apparently a report from an Italian news channel) also shows very clearly that she still has quite a lot to offer any viewers. (Don’t worry, though, the video would rate no more than “PG” under the American movie rating system, if even that.) (more…)

William F. Buckley, Jr. died on Wednesday morning (EST), discovered as deceased by his writing desk in his Stamford, CT home by his cook. There’s no doubt that this marked the passing of a notable man, and there immediately followed the appropriate deluge of eulogies and appreciations from both the American Left and Right.

But what about beyond the borders? What, if anything, did Buckley mean to foreigners? You’d have to think that the sophistication of his speech, especially his vocabulary, made his writings and especially his Firing Line television program rather hard for the non-native-English speaker to digest. And God help any such person who appeared on Firing Line, at least any who had to face Buckley before the TV cameras without accompanying guests present to help carry any argument and take off some of the rhetorical heat. Being there one-and-one with Buckley would be like being in a duel, with your pea-shooter against the other guy’s submachine-gun. (more…)

Calling all intelligence test devotees! You think you’re pretty good? Are you up for a new challenge? How about an IQ test in Czech? Mladá fronta dnes offers you one here.

Actually, it shouldn’t be that intimidating. Of course you’re wondering what question one is all about: all that explanatory text and then only one choice for an answer, labeled “START.” What that’s about, is that you get 52 points (out of a possible maximum of 142) for free, just by checking that box. They need to do that to calibrate the test, it seems; the final score you get in the end should correspond to the real IQ it reflects.

Going on: Really, you should give this a shot, it’s often easy to understand the questions – which are often expressed numerically – and then it’s often easy to answer. For example, question 4 should be clear: what is the next number that belongs in the series “16 – 34 – 70 – 142 – 286 – ?” Anyway, good luck.

The website of the mass-circulation Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes reports today that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to pay a two-day visit to Iraq starting on 2 March. It will be the very first visit ever to Iraq by the president of the Islamic Republic (which, however, has only existed since 1979). Ahmadinejad was invited there by the Iraqi president, the Kurd Jalal Talabani. The Mladá fronta dnes article – without a byline; it seems it derives to a large degree from reports from the Czech news agency CTK – claims that the US supports the vist as a means to improve Iranian-Iraqi relations. At the same time, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe called on Iran to cease its alleged support for “extremists in Iraq.”

As with most other weblogs, EuroSavant has had in the past certain topics to which it regularly returns. I’d like to keep that up, even though at least one of these, the “Poles In Iraq” series (last entry here, which deals appropriately enough with the prospect of withdrawal of Polish troops) has pretty much expired. But there remains the still-riveting tale of the EU Constitutional Treaty, now about to embark on the phase during which it is supposed to be ratified by all 25 EU member-states.

The key work to understanding what this “constitution” is all about, and so to make up my own mind whether I’m for it or not, is I think Peter Norman’s The Accidental Constitution: The Story of the European Convention, from EuroComment, which I previewed here. (Then I had long-running problems getting ahold of it, but those are finally solved.) I hope to report to you about this book shortly. In the meantime, though, the only EU head of state who has made it clear that he is against ratification – Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, of course – recently turned up the volume on his anti-constitution agitation, as the French leading daily Le Monde reports (The Czech President, the Ultraliberal Václav Klaus, Campaigns for a “No”). (more…)

Now for a EuroSavant exclusive! OK, not an “exclusive” in a “reporter” sense, but rather in what we can perhaps call the “weblog” sense of telling you about a truly “exclusive” article that you wouldn’t have heard about otherwise – or, if you had, wouldn’t have been able to read, unless you happen to read Czech. The Czech Daily Právo has the scoop here: Wounded Nemcova Likely to Return From Asia Today. (Právo Newton registration required – yeah, it’s a huge pain.) (more…)

With the new year a new national defense law came into effect in the Czech Republic – one that marks a change from most such regimes in the Western world in that it no longer discriminates between the obligations of men and women. This development is tracked in a handful of articles in the Czech press – here, here, and here – which soon all started to sound rather alike to me, until I realized that they are basically the same article from CTK, the Czech News Agency! So take your pick, although the first article (from MFDnes) has the best photo of uniformed babes, if you’re into that sort of thing. (more…)

I’ve little more to say about the ongoing tidal wave tragedy around the eastern Indian Ocean basin. Is it poor taste to move on now to other subjects? Now, I certainly agree with the proposition that the fancy parties scheduled around the upcoming Bush II inauguration (specifically, the money budgeted for them) should yield to the Asian tragedy. But closer to home, tomorrow’s the start of a brand New Year, and some celebration of that fact should still be in order.

Prague is a good place to celebrate that fact. (So is, for that matter, Amsterdam, although it’s a bit more expensive.) And right on time, in its last-edition-of-the-year, the main Czech business newspaper Hospodárské noviny features a trio of articles on its homepage about the foreigners flocking to visit the Czech capital – whether for New Year’s celebrations or more generally – under the collective headline “Do Tourists Come to Us Mainly for the Cheap Beer?” (more…)

Is the ongoing post-9/11 slump in the worldwide tourist industry getting you and your country down? Those canny business-writers at the Czech Republic’s leading business newspaper, Hospodárské noviny, have an idea for you: cue a massive public protest against your government! That’s what has done the trick for the Ukraine, a land which prior to last month’s second-round presidential election ranked among desirable tourist destinations somewhere around Upper Volta, but which is now experiencing a tourist boom, as HN reports (Crisis in Ukraine As Advertising Trick). (more…)

One thing you can say about Czech president Václav Klaus, he’s never loath to let people know his opinions. Perhaps that’s good for a head-of-state, you might say – we don’t want any slippery focus-group-pandering politician in that top office, even if it’s mostly ceremonial! – but there’s a better case to be made that, in fact, it’s not so good. Consider this: heads-of-state generally carry the title “president,” but only in that major subset of the world’s countries which call themselves (in one form or the other) “republics,” having at some point in their histories discarded the king/queen/prince/duke representative of the hereditary, unelected system of rule that emerged in most places out of the mists of history. But a lot of other countries have still kept their king/queen/prince/duke around; so they’re not republics, although by now the sovereign generally has only a fraction of the political power he/she once wielded. (more…)

The dark blight of terror has now spread its shadow a bit further ’round the world, I’m sorry to report. This from the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny (Terrorist Attack Allegedly Threatens Slovakia): The government spokesman for the Slovak Republic, Vladimir Simko, recently announced on Slovak TV that Slovakia is the possible target of a future terrorist attack. It seems that the Slovak secret intelligence service (SIS) has caught wind of something; as Simko’s announcement put it, “During radio broadcasts in lands in the Near and Middle East there has appeared speculation according to which Slovakia was designated as a possible target for a terrorist attack.” Naturally, though, there was nothing picked up about an actual imminent strike; I daresay the entire conduct of the Slovak government would have been rather different if there had been. (more…)