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According to the President Milos Zeman what would solve the economic crisis in the Crimea was the federalization of Ukraine and strengthening the autonomy of the peninsula. The head of state on Thursday during a visit to Olomouc Region also said that everything would be much easier if there was not a precedent of Kosovo. "We believe that the solution would be generally the federalization of Ukraine, and in this federalization strengthen the autonomy of Crimea, which already exists because of Crimea has its own parliament and its own government. This crisis would have been far less severe if there...

The Palestinian Authority has officially apologized to the Czech Republic over weapons that were recently discovered in the Palestinian mission in Prague. Czech authorities discovered 12 weapons and explosives inside the mission after a blast killed Palestinian ambassador Jamal al-Jamal earlier this month. The PA Foreign Ministry and Czech police said at the time the explosion occurred when Jamal opened an old safe. The Palestinian Maan news agency said the PA Foreign Ministry sent a letter of apology to the Czech government concerning the weapons and explosives that were found inside the mission compound. The agency said the PA ministry...

Welfare spending in Britain has increased faster than almost any other country in Europe since 2000, new figures show. The cost of unemployment benefits, housing support and pensions as share of the economy has increased by more than a quarter over the past thirteen years – growing at a faster rate than in most of the developed world. Spending has gone up from 18.6 per cent of GDP to 23.7 per cent of GDP – an increase of 27 per cent, according to figures from the OECD, the club of most developed nations. By contrast, the average increase in welfare...

Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Luxembourg are the only EU countries where citizens approve the European Union’s leadership with a clear 50% majority, according to a recent poll by Gallup. Approval ratings in nearly all other member states have dropped dramatically since 2008, especially in the crisis-hit south. The approval of the EU leadership is lowest in Greece (19%), Cyprus (21%) and Spain (27%), according to Gallup poll released on Wednesday (8 January). Other countries with critically low approval ratings include the United Kingdom (29%), Sweden (30%) or the Czech Republic (30%). The EU is still backed by a majority of...

Question: What happens when you forcibly implement an overly ambitious plan to overhaul your entire energy infrastructure by ridding yourself of both nuclear power and coal, instituting on outright ban on hydraulic fracturing and hence natural-gas exploration, and relentlessly subsidize politically preferred forms of so-called “green” energy that investors and consumers aren’t choosing to use of their own volition?Answer, via Bloomberg: Across the continent’s mining belt, from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, utilities such as Vattenfall AB, CEZ AS and PGE SA are expanding open-pit mines that produce lignite. The moist, brown form of the fossil fuel packs...

The Prague district hosting the embassy of the Palestinian Authority wants it moved after the ambassador was killed in a mysterious explosion this past week, local officials told AFP on Friday. "We asked the Czech foreign ministry for the embassy to be moved out of our district," Petr Hejl, senior councilor of Prague's Suchdol district, said. "The district feels betrayed by the behavior of diplomats who kept weapons and explosives at the embassy, violating Czech and international law," he told the news agency. Police said they found unregistered weapons at the PA’s diplomatic mission, but would not elaborate on the...

Dogs have been found to be sensitive to Earth's magnetic field, and apparently align themselves along the magnetic north-south axis before they defecate. Czech and German researchers studied 70 dogs during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that when the Earth's magnetic field was stable the dogs chose to align themselves with it. When it was unstable, such as during a solar flare, the dogs would become confused.

‘No explosive device on safe that killed Palestine envoy’  Published — Friday 3 January 2014 Last update 3 January 2014 1:06 am PRAGUE: A safe that exploded at the Palestinian residence in Prague, killing the ambassador, was used almost daily for storing cash, and embassy staff were not aware of any explosive safety device in it, the embassy spokesman said on Thursday. Czech police on Wednesday ruled out what they called a “terrorist attack” and said the likely cause was that a safety device that was part of the safe blew up and fatally wounded Ambassador Jamal Al-Jamal. However,...

A large, illegal weapons stockpile was found Thursday at the home of the Palestinian ambassador in Prague, Jamel al-Jamal, Czech media reported, a day after al-Jamal was killed in an explosion there. Respekt, a Czech weekly newspaper, reported that the arsenal was enough to arm a unit of ten men. […] Channel 2 News reported that the stockpile included heavy firearms, that it was held illegally, and that its existence had not been previously known to the Czech authorities. …

The Palestinian Authority's ambassador to the Czech Republic has died of wounds sustained in an explosion which rocked his house in the capital Prague. Jamal al-Jamal was rushed to hospital in a serious condition following the explosion, which apparently occurred as he was opening a safe or container of some kind. Contrary to initial reports that his family were unharmed despite being in the building at the time, it has been confirmed that al-Jamal's wife was also hurt in the blast. A spokeswoman for Prague Emergency Services told CNN that the 57 year-old ambassador has been taken to Prague military...

The Palestinian ambassador to Prague, Jamal al-Jamal, was killed in an explosion at his residence on Wednesday in an incident which Czech authorities believe was likely an accident. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said ambassador Jamal was trying to open a safe that had been recently moved to his new home when the blast occurred. A Czech government source told the Reuters news agency that the explosion was probably caused by a faulty security device on the unit. It was unclear what that was. Some safes can be fitted with mechanisms designed to destroy secret documents in the event of the...

A Palestinian diplomat has been killed by an explosion at his home in the Czech capital Prague. Jamal al-Jamal, the head of the Palestinian mission, had been taken to hospital after the explosion but died of his injuries some four hours later. Palestinian officials said the blast happened when Mr Jamal was moving a safe. Czech police say there is no evidence that it was a planned attack. ... Mr Jamal had only recently moved into the property. Palestinian officials have been quoted as saying the blast took place when Mr Jamal attempted to move a safe from an old...

American film historians recently came across a fascinating discovery when they found the Czech National Film Archive has the only surviving print of the 1929 US movie, the Mysterious Island. The archive in Prague stores around 500 films from Hollywood’s early days, proof that the global dominance of American cinema goes all the way back to the birth of the film industry.The epic American movie The Mysterious Island, loosely based on the French writer Jules Verne’s adventurous novel, was released in 1929. The Technicolor film starred, among others, the Oscar-winning actor Lionel Barrymore. But it became a financial and critical...

Nov 29 (Reuters) - The Czech Republic is close to selling up to 28 subsonic fighter jets to a private company in the United States after years of failed attempts to offload the surplus planes, the Defence Ministry said on Friday. The U.S. company, Draken International, has placed a binding bid to buy 14 L-159 planes with an option for 14 more for a total price of up to 516 million crowns ($25.7 million). The government should decide about the contract by the end of the year. It could be completed in January 2014, the defence ministry said. "The Czech...

AFTER 40 years of hesitation and seven hard years of reform and lobbying, Turkey is basking today in the most qualified of invitations to begin the process of joining Europe - a continent whose eastern half the Ottoman empire controlled for centuries. A European Commission report released yesterday, which paves the way for a deciding vote by the 25-member European Union at its December summit, was heavily qualified, and Turkish leaders were muted in their expressions of delight at their initial success. Presenting the decision to the European parliament last night, commission president Romano Prodi said it was a "qualified...

ÄŒSSD 20,53 %, ANO 2011 18,67 %, etc.

An artist has sent an unusual, but very clear message to the Czech Republic president ahead of parliamentary elections. Sculptor David Cerny created a giant purple hand -- extending an oversized middle finger -- and placed it on a pontoon boat on Prague’s main Vltava river Monday. The giant gesture floated near the famous Charles Bridge, visible from Prague Castle, where Czech President Milos Zeman would have a perfect view. Cerny -- who is locally known for his anti-communist stance -- designed the stunt before this week’s parliamentary elections, which could give the communists a taste of power almost a...

THE BLACK stain on the ice was instantly recognisable. The technician checking a tarpaulin stretched over a section of the Presena Glacier in the Italian Alps—an experimental attempt to slow the melting— quickly called in a rescue party. The block of ice was airlifted to the nearby city of Vicenza. Inside were two soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Presena in May 1918 and were buried in a crevasse.Their uniforms and their location indicated that they could well have been Kaiserschützen, specialised mountain troops who fought on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to defend these mountains from...

The Cairo-based Arab League has condemned remarks by the Czech president about moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, calling them a violation of Palestinian rights and international resolutions. … The United Nations proposed an international jurisdiction for Jerusalem when it wrote the mandate for a Jewish state in 1947, but a 1948 war divided the city between Israeli and Jordanian control. …

Silesians. They have their own language, a long history and they live in one of the richest regions of Poland. Today their calls for autonomy are echoing louder and louder. When they enjoyed unexpected success in regional elections last autumn for the first time in twenty years, Warsaw woke up to a problem in its territories along the Czech border. Katowice (Poland) A march organised by Silesian autonomists At the congress of the Movement for Silesian Autonomy, in Katowice, a triumphal mood reigns. Delegates, some hundred and thirty of them who arrived in early March, some in traditional Silesian garb,...