Nábytkářský řetězec IKEA v České republice letos otevře výdejní místa v sedmi městech. Zákazníkům budou dostupná v Hradci Králové, Karlových Varech, Českých Budějovicích, Plzni, Ústí nad Labem, Liberci a ve Zlíně. Do konce roku by v pražských...

Celá léta se dokola mluví o tom, že Česká republika má být "zemí pro budoucnost". Jenže nějak to pořád nefunguje. Za třicet let jsme se nedokázali vrátit na pozici, kterou jsme měli v mezinárodním srovnání za první republiky. A ani teď to nevypadá,...

IN ONE VIDEO clip, filmed in the French capital on January 18th, a protester is pinned to the ground on his back and punched several times in the face by a policeman. In another, the previous week, a riot policeman shoots a rubber bullet into a protester at a range of just 2 metres (2.2 yards). Neither of these incidents by itself is more shocking than many others that have taken place over the past year. But for the first time the government has now recognised that the police are too violent.

The Paris public prosecutor has launched an inquiry into each of these cases. Last year the number of investigations opened by the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, the force’s internal watchdog, jumped by 20% to 1,400. One reason was the rise of the gilets jaunes (yellow jacket) protests, which often turned violent and elicited a heavy-handed response. Since the movement began in November 2018, according to a count by David Dufresne, a reporter, 25 people have lost an eye, five have lost a hand, and 318 have suffered head wounds. But excessive force is not confined to demonstrations. This month a motorbike courier died after asphyxiating while being arrested in Paris.

At first the French government underplayed the seriousness of the problem. With a hard core of protesters torching cars,...

EVERY GERMAN knows the torments of Funklöcher, the patchwork of telephonic dead spots unmolested by radio signals, where smartphones fall silent and internet connections evaporate. Stuck for years in the slow lane of the rich world’s telecoms, Germany is determined not to be left behind as fifth-generation (5G) networks gear up to connect factories, cars and devices. But the government’s plans have hit an unexpected roadblock.

Like other rich countries, Germany has been agonising over whether to let Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, bid for contracts to build its 5G networks. Huawei offers experience, expertise and value; its kit makes up 70% of Germany’s 4G network. But securocrats worry that Chinese spooks may exploit “back doors” or other vulnerabilities supposedly built in to Huawei equipment. Others worry about relying on suppliers linked to potential adversaries. What if the Chinese government banned Huawei from “exporting” crucial software patches during a trade dispute with Europe? The American government, which banned Huawei in 2011, has threatened to withdraw intelligence-sharing from Western governments that fail to fall into line.

Germany’s Huawei row has become perhaps Europe’s biggest debate over China policy yet. It taps several sore spots. The country’s large export sector leaves...

IT TAKES SURPRISINGLY little effort to get a Eurocrat to talk about sex. The European Commission plugs its various exchange programmes with cartoons of young people dreaming of meeting hot Spanish ladies and hunky French men. Spokespeople boast that such liaisons on its Erasmus student exchange have led to 1m babies. The scheme “increased the European libido” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourgish former president of the European Commission. Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, summed up this strand of thinking about the EU: “I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl—they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children.”

Now Eurocrats have a new excuse to bring up the topic: babies, or rather the lack of them. A demographic slump in eastern Europe has led to panic among its leaders, who are scrambling to come up with ways of boosting baby production. At summits, EU leaders grumble about lousy birth rates as well as great affairs of state. Across the bloc women can expect to have an average of 1.6 babies each, or as few as 1.3 in some countries. That leaves Europe with too few children to maintain its population absent immigration. After years of nagging from eastern member states, the topic was placed on the European Council’s strategic agenda for the next five years. For the...

EVER SINCE the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party took power in 2015, Adam Bodnar, Poland’s human-rights ombudsman, has been warning against its relentless efforts to get control of the courts. To illustrate the danger, he uses an expression from communist times: lex telefonica. In the Polish People’s Republic, verdicts were routinely dictated by a phone call from an apparatchik at party headquarters. Today’s government has more subtle techniques, but the goal is the same, Mr Bodnar says: “If a judge has a case on his desk with some political importance, he should be afraid.”

The European Commission is worried, too. It accuses PiS of violating Poland’s commitments to the rule of law under the European Union’s founding treaty. In 2017 the commission took Poland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over laws that gave politicians control over appointing judges. (For example, they lowered judges’ retirement age while letting the justice minister pick whom to exempt.) The ECJ ruled against the Poles, who had in the meantime scrapped some of the measures.

Now another ruling by the ECJ threatens to force Poland into an open break with the EU. Last year PiS passed a law creating a disciplinary chamber for the country’s Supreme Court, which has stubbornly resisted government...

MORE THAN a million people, 90% of them Jews, had been murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau by the time the Soviet army liberated it on January 27th, 1945. The biggest German death camp in Poland is a universally acknowledged symbol of Nazi evil. Yet the 75th anniversary of its liberation has become a political battleground.

One ceremony to commemorate it will be hosted by Poland on January 27th at the site of the camp. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, will boycott it. Another took place four days earlier at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, boycotted that one because Mr Putin was asked to give a speech and he was not. (Yad Vashem said only liberating countries’ leaders could speak—though they included Germany.)

Antipathy between Poland and Russia is ancient. But over the past month Mr Putin has fanned the flames by launching one of the biggest propaganda offensives of his 20-year hold on power, comparable to the anti-NATO speech he delivered in Munich in 2007. This time he tried to upend the entire history of Soviet aggression towards eastern Europe. A key moment in that story is August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and agreed to carve up eastern Europe. The next month, the Nazis and the Soviets invaded Poland and the second world war began....

ROMANIA’S NEW state-owned supermarket, the Unirea Agro-Food Trade House, looks like a nod to the communist past. The first two stores, which opened in October, are bare-bones, their shelves stocked with mono-branded staples like pear jam and pork in lard. But this is not a food bank supplying cheap calories to the poor; prices are similar to those at private competitors. Rather, it is an effort to get Romanian agriculture, now largely off the books, to enter the formal economy—and start taxing it.

After the fall of communism, Romania divided its agricultural land between former collective farms (transformed into private companies) and the people who had worked on them. Many of those smallholders have since left the countryside or grown old. Some lease their land to big farming outfits, including foreign ones. But usually they let their neighbours farm it, in exchange for a portion of the harvest.

As a result, Romania has a huge number of farmers (one in three farms in the European Union is Romanian) but an unproductive agricultural sector. The big farms are patchy, and thus difficult to industrialise. The rest are mostly smaller than two football pitches. Farmers eat much of their crop, and sell the rest at informal markets or streetside kiosks.

The government has tried to scale up production by pushing farmers...

TALKS BETWEEN the Colombian government and the FARC rebels were stuck. The two sides could not agree on how to bring those responsible for crimes during the country’s 52-year civil war to account. But with the help of Inter Mediate, a British charity, a way forward was found, involving the appointment of three independent lawyers on each side. In 2015 a pioneering transitional-justice deal was reached.

When official efforts to resolve a conflict are lacking or bogged down, another way must be found. “You need a referee,” says Jonathan Powell of Inter Mediate, “and that has to be someone who’s trusted by both sides.” The involvement of third parties can take many forms. They can help as advisers (as in Colombia). They may open a back channel (as South Africa’s ruling National Party did in order to negotiate an end to apartheid with the African National Congress—representatives of the two hostile sides secretly met in an English country house owned by a gold-mining firm). Increasingly, they establish entire alternative avenues for dialogue. Such diplomacy, known as Track 2, fills the void left by the official sort in Track 1.

The term, first used in 1981 by an American diplomat, Joseph Montville, covers everything from modest workshops to major initiatives. Even the author of a book on the subject, Peter Jones of the...

Výrobce infrastruktury informačních a komunikačních technologií a chytrých zařízení, společnost Huawei, posílila svůj komunikační tým v České republice. K senior PR manažerovi a tiskovému mluvčímu, kterým je od května 2019 Pavel Košek, se na pozici...

Od 1. ledna 2020 nastoupila na pozici vedoucí úseku produktu a marketingu ve Volkswagen Financial Services Jana Hrušková. Ve své nové roli se chce zaměřit na posílení značky společnosti prostřednictvím efektivní komunikace se zaměřením na klíčové...

Do společnosti KPC-Group, zastoupení Gartner pro Českou republiku, Slovensko a Rumunsko, nastoupila koncem roku 2019 na pozici Senior Account Executive Martina Marešová.

Výrazně nejhůře dopadá v regionální vzdělanosti Ústecký kraj, následovaný Karlovarským. Oba regiony mají nejméně příznivou vzdělanostní strukturu v rámci Česka. Podle údajů Krajského akčního plánu vzdělávání v Ústeckém kraji z března 2017 získalo...

Studenti po celém světě stávkují za ochranu klimatu, členové hnutí Extinction Rebellion blokují centra metropolí a australského premiéra tlačí protestující k rezignaci, protože odmítá ukončit vývoz uhlí. Ze suroviny, které se v Česku dříve láskyplně...

Petr Paukner vlastní společnost Carbounion, největšího českého obchodníka s uhlím. Na rozdíl od řady kolegů z branže nepovažuje snahu evropských zemí přestat používat uhlí k výrobě energie za pošetilou. Česko by však podle něj mělo svou...

Černé uhlí je jedním z hlavních pilířů australské ekonomiky. Díky němu do země ročně přiteče téměř 50 miliard dolarů. Mezi dvaceti nejbohatšími Australany jsou čtyři uhlobaroni, včetně nejbohatší Australanky Giny Rinehartové. Těžba této energetické...

Česká ekonomika je poměrně odolná vůči krizím. Podle hlavního ekonoma České spořitelny Davida Navrátila je totiž domácí hospodářství ve srovnání s jinými vyspělými státy dostatečně diverzifikované. Avšak do budoucna by se přesto mělo změnit. Hlavním...

Andrej Babiš umí hodně věcí, ale opravdový kalibr je na zacházení s nápady politické opozice. Některé nemilosrdně likviduje v zárodku, jiné si jednoduše osvojí, a minulé pondělí stihl dokonce obojí. Dopoledne definitivně poslal k ledu iniciativu...

Za peníze si lze pořídit hodně věcí. Letos se ukáže, jestli je za ně možné koupit i vítězství v amerických prezidentských volbách. Dosud nevídanou sumu ve výši až dvou miliard dolarů plánuje podle informací amerických novinářů vložit do kampaně ze...

Pražský bytový trh po letech strádání a prudkého růstu cen hlásí první, byť opatrné dobré zprávy. V loňském roce podle údajů ČSÚ zahájili developeři v metropoli výstavbu největšího počtu bytů od finanční krize v roce 2008: celkem téměř pěti tisíc....