WORKERS 

The Interior Ministry has stopped issuing work visas to North Korean citizens and will not extend the validity of current visas, Týden magazine reported Jan. 29. According to the ministry, there were 402 North Koreans, most of them women, legally working in the Czech Republic as of September 2006. Media reports have accused the North Korean government of siphoning off most of the workers’ wages and forcing them to live in poor conditions.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Jan. 26 visit to Prague ended without much progress in her bid to raise support for the European Union constitution. In meetings with both Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek and President Václav Klaus, Merkel failed to win approval for the constitution. Both Topolánek and Klaus said the current document fails to protect national interests. Germany will hold the six-month rotating EU presidency until the end of June.

Four members of the Czech Army were nabbed in a drug raid at a Gripen fighter plane base in Čáslav, central Bohemia, Mladá fronta Dnes reported Jan. 30. So far two have been charged with possessing the materials to produce heroin, police said. If the soldiers, aged from 2022, are convicted, they will be expelled from the military, an official said. They were not pilots but worked as technical staff at the base. Police expect more charges in the investigation.

The wife of Deputy Prime Minister Jiří Čunek was questioned by police Jan. 29 in connection with allegations of bribery levied against her husband. Čunek is accused of accepting a bribe of nearly 500,000 Kč ($23,000) in 2002 when he was mayor of the east Moravian town of Vsetín. Čunek produced documents on Czech Television Jan. 28 that he says prove his innocence.

UK

Northern Ireland’s major Catholic-backed political party, Sinn Fein, voted Jan. 28 to back the region’s Protestant-dominated police force. The historic decision has “the potential to change the political landscape on this island forever,” Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams told his party’s delegates after the vote. Sinn Fein’s previous unwillingness to work with the police has hampered efforts to maintain peace between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

An official at a Russian scientific institute confirmed Jan. 26 that a sample of uranium sent to its lab by Georgia was weapons-grade. The confirm­ation came as the first public state­ment by a Russian official since reports emerged Jan. 24 alleging that security agents had seized weapons-grade uranium from a Russian man in a sting operation in Georgia last February. The quantity of ­seized uranium is too small to produce a nuclear weapon. Following the arrest, Russia called the ­allegations a propaganda ploy by Georgia.

The French Socialist Party voted Jan. 27 to expel one of its leaders for comments made last November, denouncing the country’s football team for having too many black players. Georges Freche, 68, was head of the regional government in the southern region of Languedoc-Roussillon. The incident is the latest setback for the presidential campaign of Socialist candidate Segolene Royal. The elections will be held in April.

Residents of the town of Oswiecim were honored Jan. 27 at a ceremony marking the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. A representative of President Lech Kaczyński pinned medals on approximately 40 townspeople who risked their lives to help inmates at Auschwitz. The notorious concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was lib­erated on Jan. 27, 1945 by the Soviet army.

Anti-abortion demonstrators marched through the capital city of Lisbon Jan. 28, two weeks before a planned referendum on whether to lift restrictions on the procedure. The current abortion laws in Portugal are among the strictest in Europe: the operation is permitted only if the fetus is malformed or was conceived through rape or if the health of the mother is endangered by the pregnancy. Police estimated the number of demonstrators at 2,000, but organizers placed the figure at 5,000.

The Slovak military has completed its planned troop withdrawal from Iraq, Prime Minister Robert Fico told Slovak radio Jan. 27. The deployment, numbering approximately 100 soldiers, has been moved to neigh­boring Kuwait, he said. Slovak Defense Minister František Kašický said 11 officers will remain in Iraq to train the country’s military. Four Slovak soldiers have died since they were assigned to Iraq in 2003.

An Iraqi-born Dutch citizen ac­cused of involvement in terrorist attacks against American troops in Iraq in 2003 has been extradited to the United States, Dutch officials confirmed Jan. 27. The trial of Wesam al Delaema, 32, will mark the first time a suspect has been prosecuted in a U.S. court for terrorist acts in Iraq.