News today which is of more than passing interest from the Czech Republic. The South Korean industrial group Hyundai has announced that it is going to build its first European car plant at Nosovice. The factory - which is scheduled to cost around one billion euros - should begin production in October [...]

Well the new EU energy plan has been released (and here, and you can also find the actual Commission statement here). The final product is pretty much as the leaks suggested.
As was indicated yesterday, Russia related concerns are central. The FT comments:
Russia supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas needs and the Union’s dependence [...]

The Czech Republic is booming apparently. Both per-capita GDP and fertility are definitely on an upswing, although surprisingly perhaps, for once I am not going to try and suggest that these are connected:
The Czech republic has joined Slovenia among new member states with higher levels of wealth per capita than old member Portugal, according to [...]

Interesting news from the Czech Republic in this week:
The Czech republic has joined Slovenia among new member states with higher levels of wealth per capita than old member Portugal, according to European Commission statistics.
The central European country enjoyed gross income per capita of 73 percent of the EU 25 average last year compared to 71 [...]

The EU Observer reports today on how some states are decidedly tardy in producing their Lisbon Agenda action plans:
Embassies are due to hand in their national plans, consisting of 30-40 page dossiers with statistical annexes, by the weekend, with EU experts flying back and forth to member states in the past few weeks to help [...]

Earlier this year, Eurobarometer started asking members what they thought about future EU expansion. The results (which can be found here, as a pdf) were pretty interesting.
52% of Europeans support membership for Croatia, while only 34% oppose it. (War criminals? What war criminals?) And 50% support membership for Bulgaria. But [...]

the Czech president has become the first prominent EU politician to call for the ratification process to stop after the French vote.
According to the Czech news agency CTK, Vaclav Klaus, a well-known eurosceptic, said that to carry on the ratification process would be useless, although the Czech prime minister has said he is in favour [...]

I missed this at the time, but apparently officials responsible for monetary policy in the Czech Republic are begining to have second thoughts about joining the euro.
“Czech central bank policy maker Robert Holman said the government should abandon plans to adopt the euro by 2010 because joining the single currency may stifle growth, the first [...]

Just when you thought the Czech Republic had finally turned into a normal, boring European country…
Prague blogger Doug Arellanes has re-capped the Czech PM apartment scandal story thus far, saving me the trouble. (Frankly Arellanes has told the story better than could have.) As he rightly says, the story “is taking on magical-realist tones.” [...]

On the previously mentioned subject of Europe’s “free” movement of labor (and the possibility of a massive influx of cheap labor from the east come EU accession time) here’s an article I wrote on the topic in November for Czech and Slovak Construction Journal (for some reason the article’s not posted online).
If you’re too [...]