Pity the powerful. Things so common and cheerful in ordinary life as a pregnancy will now become an extraordinary story: In this case, involving a married prime minister and the single deputy head of Parliament, Talmanová. Fortunately enough, they both belong to the same party — the Civic Democrats (ODS).

Topolánek is lucky to have been born in modern times. Adultery was a serious crime in the Middle Ages, for example, and the adulterer could lose his head quite easily.

Topolánek is also lucky to have become prime minister of such a tolerant country as the Czech Republic. Anyone who repeatedly practices infidelity in the United States, for instance, usually faces a political career cut short.

The prime minister wants to take care of his own problems, but, at the same time, he is a public person. People don't want their prime minister to lie and cheat. How can they trust a man whose own wife calls him a liar?

We should watch our own lives and not judge others, however. But, if you are at the top of the political ladder, you have to make sacrifices. If Topolánek doesn't want journalists digging around his private life, he can leave office. Or he can solve his domestic problems and stop pouring gas onto the fire.

Topolánek could ask former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder for help. Schröder was divorced three times; his foreign minister four times. They both survived their personal troubles with no significant harm. We cannot just tell somebody to get divorced. I can imagine the fight inside Topolánek's head, and I am really happy I am not in his shoes. But, if he wants to be a proper prime minister, he must resolve his troubles soon, Verner writes.

The Gay Initiative has agreed to dissolve after 17 years of existence, and it's a rare quality to be able to identify the right time when a project of one generation has come to an end, Tomáš Němeček writes in Hospodářské noviny Jan. 4.

Last year's registered partnership law is sufficient for the group, and it won't try to fight for the rights of gays to adopt children.

The founder of Gay Initiative, actor Jiří Hromada, was open about his homosexuality even in those times when it was considered sheer bravery and not a fashion or artistic difference. There are few issues for which to fight with fervor in the Czech Republic: Homosexuality is no longer considered a crime (as it was until 1961), nor an illness (until 1993). Last year, 200 couples were finally able to make use of the state's blessing, being the first in the former communist bloc, and most of the public didn't seem to care at all.

It would be nice to write that this put an end to the gay rights movement, and that society found a borderline between liberals and conservatives.

A younger generation of activists from the Gay and Lesbian League impatiently tried to convey a message to Hromada for quite a time: Thank you, it's time you left. They were sending him to a "gay retirement," because he doesn't have the drive anymore. So gay unions are OK, and let's wait a few years and see what happens next, Němeček writes.