Free Republic

On December 21, 2023, a student at Charles University in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, killed about 14 people and injured about two dozen others in a planned and premeditated mass murder.The killer used a rifle with a telescopic sight and is said to have had a number of other firearms with him. The murderer used the advantage of the height of a multistory building to see the people he was targeting and as a way to shield him from immediate response.I believe it was on May 30, 2022, in Boise Idaho, Ed Monk and I were presenters...

SAN FRANCISCO - A foreign news crew covering the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco was allegedly robbed while working. Journalists from a Czech Republic public television, who were in the Bay Area on assignment, were robbed of some of their equipment on Sunday evening while recording near the famed City Lights bookstore, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The San Francisco Police Department confirmed it is investigating an armed robbery of a production team at 4:56 p.m. in the area of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. According to officers, a vehicle stopped on the street, and three armed men with...

The tech billionaires behind a project to build a utopian new city in California's Bay Area have released the first artistic renderings of their ambitious plans. Previously known only as 'Flannery Associates,' the group rebranded as 'California Forever' and released the plans in a publicity blitz on Thursday night, following months of silence and speculation. Led by former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, the group's backers include Silicon Valley heavyweights such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz investor Marc Andreessen, and Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs. California Forever is now the largest landowner in Solano County, which is...

After weeks of local speculation, the purchasers of 55,000 acres of northern California land have been revealed. The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Their goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy. The land bought by the firm encircles Travis air force base in Fairfield, a city of about 120,000 residents and home to the...

Jan Lipavský says the deaths underscore that diplomats work ‘in extremely difficult conditions and often in isolation from family.’Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský has sent a letter to foreign ministry staff asking them to find a better balance between professional and personal lives, after three Czech diplomats aged 46 to 55 died suddenly in the past five months. In the letter, seen by POLITICO, Lipavský asks foreign ministry employees not to underestimate the need to care for their physical and mental health. “Do not to forget that every job, including ours, has its own values and ambitions, but also ‘healthy’...

The protest at Wenceslas Square in the city center was held a day after the government survived a no-confidence vote amid opposition claims of inaction against inflation and energy prices. Organizers of the demonstration...said the central European nation should be neutral militarily and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia. The vote showed how Europe’s energy crisis is fueling political instability as soaring power prices stoke inflation, already at levels unseen in three decades. Prime Minister Petr Fiala, who leads the center-right, five-party coalition, told CTK news service on Saturday that "The protest on Wenceslas Square was called by...

An estimated 70,000 people protested in Prague against the Czech government on Saturday, calling on the ruling coalition to do more to control soaring energy prices and voicing opposition to the European Union and NATO. Organizers of the demonstration from a number of far-right and fringe political groups including the Communist party, said the central European nation should be neutral militarily and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.\ Police estimates put the number of protesters at around 70,000 by mid-afternoon. The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially...

Hungary, along with other Eastern European countries including Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, have all but banned Muslim immigration, despite being harassed by EU leaders because of it. Hungary refuses to abide by the quotas given to them by the EU for accepting Muslim invaders posing as asylum seekers, and as a result the EU is threatening them with sanctions and fines. PART 1 Video In this video, you can see the brutal and grotesque, far-left media bias against what they call “racist” Western Europeans who abandon their native land because of how mass Muslim immigration has changed it…for...

Bacho Kiro Cave. (Nikolay Doychinov/AFP via Getty Images) Last year, a genetic analysis of bone fragments representing our earliest known presence in Europe raised a few questions over the steps modern humans took to conquer every corner of the modern world. Whoever the remains belonged to, their family background was more entwined with the East Asian populations of their day than with today's Europeans, hinting at a far more convoluted migration for our species than previously thought. Now, researchers from the Universities of Padova and Bologna in Italy have proposed what they think might be the simplest explanation for the...

Many demonstrators who gathered at Wenceslas Square chanted, "Freedom," challenged the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines in general and rejected the idea of vaccinated children, according to the AP. The large demonstration followed several smaller ones in cities across the Czech Republic on Saturday. The previous Czech government announced vaccine mandates in December for those 60 and older as well as for health care workers and first responders.

The Czech Republic and Slovakia hit record numbers for new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday. The Czech Republic reached a new high of 22,479 cases, marking an increase of nearly 8,000 from just a week ago and surpassing a previous record set in January by 5,000, according to The Associated Press. With 8,342 new cases, Slovakia exceeded its previous record of 7,244 cases, which was set on Friday, the AP reported.

The Power of the Powerless To the memory of Jan Patocka "The Power of the Powerless" (October 1978) was originally written ("quickly," Havel said later) as a discussion piece for a projected joint Polish Czechoslovak volume of essays on the subject of freedom and power. All the participants were to receive Havel's essay, and then respond to it in writing. Twenty participants were chosen on both sides, but only the Czechoslovak side was completed. Meanwhile, in May 1979, some of the Czechoslovak contributors who were also members of VONS (the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted), including Havel, were arrested,...

In 2015, after the series of Paris Jihadi Terrorist attacks, the bureaucrats in the European Union found an opportunity to further restrict the ownership of firearms in European countries. They created extremely restrictive new protocols which further restricted the ownership of common arms. The Czech Republic had some of the least restrictive firearm laws in the European Union. To the Czech people, the ability to own firearms, and use them for protection, was a significant measure of freedom, which they did not have when they were part of the Soviet Empire.The move for the amendment started in 2015, after the...

The Russian diplomats are suspected of being intelligence operatives involved in an explosion at a Czech arms depot in 2014 which killed two people. Two Russians suspected of carrying out a nerve agent attack in the UK in 2018 are now also being linked to the blast. EU foreign ministers are due to discuss the accusations. Moscow has given the Czech diplomats a day to leave, while the Czech Republic has given the Russians 72 hours. Russia's foreign ministry called the Czech decision "unprecedented" and a "hostile act".

he Czech Republic is informing its NATO and European Union allies about suspected Russian involvement in a 2014 ammunition depot explosion and will discuss the matter at an EU foreign ministers' meeting on Monday, acting Foreign Minister Jan Hamacek said on Twitter on Sunday. The central European country expelled 18 Russian embassy staff on Saturday and said that investigations linked Russian intelligence to the explosion, which killed two people. The expulsions and allegations by Prague have triggered its biggest dispute with Russia since the end of the communist era in 1989. The Interfax news agency cited Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy...

Back in the 1980s, anthropologist Emanuel Vlček visited Prague Castle to examine two skeletons linked to the Přemyslid dynasty, a royal house active between the late 800s and 1306 A.D. Now, reports Czech news outlet iROZHLAS, researchers have used modern technology to analyze these remains and envision what their owners might have looked like.A joint Czech-Brazilian research group drew on facial reconstruction techniques to approximate the appearances of two medieval brothers: Dukes Spytihněv I (circa 875–915) and Vratislav or Vratislaus I (circa 888–921), father of Czech patron saint Wenceslas I.The team, which included archaeologists Jiří Šindelář and Jan Frolík, photographer...

The Czech Republic is facing a medical 'collapse' with the army rigging up field hospitals as the country suffers the worst infection rate in Europe. After escaping the first wave relatively lightly, the Eastern European country has been battered by a resurgence in recent weeks which has infected more than 4,000 hospital workers and forced the closure of schools, bars and restaurants. Hospitals are treating six times as many virus patients as during the first wave, with other surgeries being cancelled and plans being drawn up for patients to be exported to Germany, Hungary or Poland. 'We are in danger...

Face masks aren't mandatory everywhere, but strict rules on wearing them have been enforced in the Czech Republic -- even for nudists. The European country has begun to relax restrictions imposed because of the coronavirus, but at the height of concerns late last month, police were called in to remind people that while it was OK to get naked in designated public places, mouths needed to be covered. Czech law enforcers issued a warning after officers were called out on March 27 in the small town of Lázně Bohdaneč, east of Prague, because of complaints about maskless naturists basking in...

Four people were killed and two seriously wounded on Tuesday in a shooting at a hospital in the northeastern Czech city of Ostrava. Police are searching ...

I'll be vacationing this year in the Czech Republic and will be taking my Surface Pro 3 tablet and Android phone. Any recommendations on a EU compatible plug? USB charger ports are a definite plus. Will the plug also need a converter? Cost range?