The printing of ballots, originally scheduled for today, has been halted, Aktuálně.cz has reported; the Constitutional Court on Thursday cancelled early elections scheduled for 9 and 10 October. The state budget with a record deficit of CZK 230 billion approved by the cabinet on Wednesday night, will not be adopted in time, media reported on Thursday.
>>> Only 5% of Czech men cook regularly, a Mf Dnes headline said on Monday. “How do you feel about the hectares of gobbled up forests?” HN asked Jan Stráský, council chair of the Šumava national park in connection with the damage caused by bark beetles. After his Saturday visit to Šumava former PM Miloš Zeman calculated the damage at 32 billion.
>>> TOP 09 has targeted Baník Ostrava’s fans. The football club’s captain will run for the party in general elections. A regional league football player died of a heart attack after scoring a goal against his own team on Sunday, ČTK reported. Disappointed with his performance, striker Jan Koller quit the national team after a tie 2:2 with Slovakia in a World Cup match on Saturday. The national team beat San Marino 7:0 on Wednesday.
>>> Ice-cream tasting like meat or slivovitz is sold in Stráž pod Ralskem, the daily Právo reported on Saturday. The prices of groceries have been sharply falling in the past four months, Mf Dnes reported on Tuesday.
>>> The Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer, a political activist and an exile fighter for human rights of Uyghurs in China, arrived in Prague on Thursday. Two sculptors had a fist fightover a Woodrow Wilson statue at the Prague main train station on Monday. Ombudsman Otakar Motejl called Petra Paroubková’s pregnancy an act of political calculation, Právo reported on Saturday.
>>> The lower house overturned President Václav Klaus’s veto and approved car-scrapping bonus on Wednesday. Škoda Auto is planning layoffs in connection with Germany ending its car scrap subsidies, Hospodářské noviny reported on Monday. Škoda Auto and ČEZ belong to the business elite among CEE companies, the TOP 500 CEE ranking compiled by Deloitte showed.
>>> The Prague zoo has to stop using its logo depicting a Przewalski horse within two months after losing a dispute with the logo’s author on Tuesday. A former circus director, Jaroslav Proche, was among the applicants for the position of the Czech Radio director, Mf Dnes reported on Monday.
>>> The number of pigs in the Czech Republic rose by 8% to 2,129 million between April and August, Lidové noviny reported on Thursday. The number of university graduates in the Czech Republic rose from 11% to 14% from 1997 to 2007, the Czech Education Ministry and the Institute for information in education (ÚIV) said on Tuesday. High-school students are celebrating, a unified school-leaving exam has been postponed until spring 2011.
>>> New hi-tech National Technical Library opened in Prague on Wednesday. Czech publishers oppose Google’s plan do digitize millions of books.
>>> “That paranoid! I have no idea, what’s going on,” Karel Randák, who started the Tuscany scandal around ODS head Mirek Topolánek, told Lidové noviny in connection with Topolánek saying that another scandal “Tuscany #2”, is being planned to discredit him.
>>> Economy shrank by record 5.5% in Q2. Construction company Skanska plans to lay off 1,200 of its 6,800 employees this year and next. “The numbers show that the Czech economy is leaving recession behind, which is very positive,” Wednesday’s daily Právo quoted Jiří Škorp from Komerční banka. Inflation hit its lowest point in six years in August.
