Search

Oilseed rape is frequently damaged by insect pests. Much attention is paid to the protection of oilseed rape against Brassicogethes aeneus (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae), which is one of the most significant pests of spring and winter oilseed rape. The presence of different pollen beetle species was monitored in the Czech Republic in the years 2011–2013. A minimum of 500 individuals were captured at each site. Morphometric characteristics and the morphology of male and/or female genitalia were used to determine species. B. aeneus, B. subaeneus, B. viridescens and B. coracinus were most abundant. Other species presented in oilseed rape were B. coeruleovirens, B. czwalinai, B. matronalis, B. anthracinus, Boragogethes symphyti, Cychramus luteus, Fabogethes nigrescens, Genistogethes carinulatus, Meligethes atratus, Sagitogethes maurus, and Lamiogethes atramentarius. Our main conclusion is that the reason for the presence of the pollen beetle species associated with their development into non-cruciferous plants in oilseeds is the sufficiency of pollen as food for beetles. In addition, they may occur here incidentally, as they can be transported relatively long distances by air. Accompanying species of pollen beetles probably also have a positive effect on abundance reduction in species considered to be harmful as they are hosts to parasitoids of the oilseed rape pest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zemdirbyste-Agriculture is the property of Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture & Forestry and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sixty-five Czech Meligethes populations were tested against lambda-cyhalothrin and chlorpyrifos-ethyl in 2014. In 2015, totally sixty Meligethes populations, some of which sampled also in Slovakia, were tested against the two insecticides. Adult vial tests by IRAC (Insecticide Resistance Action Committee) were used for testing (No. 011 v. 3 for lambda-cyhalothrin and No. 025 for chlorpyrifos-ethyl). For each of the tested populations the LC50, LC90, and in 2015 also LC95 values were determined for both these insecticides. Correlation analyses were made with transformed (log10 transformation) LC values. No significant correlation was recorded between the LC50 values. Contrary to that, significant (P < 0.05) negative (r values for negative) correlations were recorded between the LC90 and LC95 values. Pyrethroid resistance in pollen beetle populations should indicate their slightly higher susceptibility to chlorpyrifos-ethyl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Susceptibility of Meligethes sp. (mainly M. aeneus) from the Czech Republic was tested with lambda-cyhalothrin (111 samples in 2009, 125 in 2010, and 102 in 2011) through the use of IRAC method No. 011, Vers. 3. Resistant samples were the most frequent in all three years and their proportions increased from 33% to 62% between 2009 and 2011. The last samples classified as highly susceptible were recorded in 2010. The mean percentage mortalities for a common European field rate of 7.5 g a.i/ha were 82.2% in 2009, 78.92% in 2010, and 67.45% in 2011(according to Abbott's formula). The values of LC50 ranged from 0.084 to 47.27 g a.i./ha in 2009, from 0.051 to 46.78 g a.i./ha in 2010, and from 0.238 to 19.92 g a.i./ha in 2011. Only in 17.65% of samples there were LC90 values below the European field rate in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perceive communication, cooperation, application of differentiation and individualization, maximum expectation from pupils and respect among participants of education, as characteristic features of inclusive education. In this paper we carry out qualitative and quantitative analyses of data obtained from six selected indicators relating to respect in Czech primary schools, which we perceive as a necessary condition for inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Badly defined institutional framework caused many problems of the Czech transition. Designers of the economic reform did not respect the importance of precisely functioning market institutions. No doubts that building institutions supports the functioning of markets. The article analyses why Czech economists and politicians did not understand the problem in the beginning and how they attempted to correct this initial mistake. The Czech (Slovak) economy was in a worse situation if compared with other central European countries because any private sector did not exist there before 1990. Both formal and informal institutions were built here in the green field. After politically sensitive problems with financial crime the building of institutions was accelerated in late 1990s. The process of re-building Czech market institutions continues within EU now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatization of the Czech banking sector was not an ideal process. Many errors and failures could be mentioned. The role of national banking for the raising of national entrepreneurial class was overvalued. There was also a broad naiveté about a great interest of potential investors. Also the timing of privatization of Czech banks is a topic for a discussion: It is complicated to deduce when was the optimal time for privatization but the majority of economists concluded that the banks were privatized too late. Privatization led to the following results: At the end of the process there is a standard banking sector in the Czech Republic as well the prices from privatization were the best prices (measured by price/NAV) from all of the transition countries. The cost of transformation of the Czech banking was extremely high. The text is focused mainly to the procedural problems of the Czech banking privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at uses of the word "samizdat" in the mid-1970s, focusing on České rozhovory (Czech Conversations), a book of interviews that journalist Jiří Lederer conducted with other banned writers (such as Ludvík Vaculík, Václav Havel, Jiří Gruša, Aleksandr Kliment and others) in 1975 and 1976. The author carries out a "thick description" (in the tradition of Clifford Geertz) of the word "samizdat", uncovering a range of connotations tied to the inadequacy of unofficial culture. Rather than constituting a fully functioning alternative culture, samizdat was often seen as inadequate and artificial (like "palm trees above the arctic circle," in the words of writer Jaroslav Putík); it was a mere substitute for genuine cultural production, operating in a minimal communications network and preserving a finite, even tiny number of material copies for future generations. The article thus proposes an alternative to a common scholarly reading of Czech unofficial cultural activity in the 1970s, in which samizdat is seen as part of a systematic, well-organized effort to create an alternative culture and thereby to undermine the Communist regime. In fact, as the author suggests through a brief reading of Havel's "Six Asides About Culture" (1984), "samizdat" acquired these connotations only later - to some extent this happened in the framework of Charter 77 and the whole theory of a "parallel polis," although the process of "re-reading" samizdat as a widespread and effective communications network continues after 1989 and through to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Opera Slavica is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the mid-1970s, no Western leader on an official visit to a Soviet Bloc country wasted any thoughts on whether or not to meet a dissident, even in countries where dissidents actually existed. By the late 1980s, such encounters had become part of an almost obligatory ritual. This remarkably swift and dramatic transformation was both preceded and accompanied by a similar change in the relationship between diplomats and dissidents. All of this happened despite considerable resistance on the part of the regimes in the host countries, which sometimes resorted to retaliatory measures, including expulsions. This article examines the role played by the United Kingdom in this normative and practical change. It identifies the different layers of relationships between the British government and Soviet Bloc dissidents, distinguishing between 'para-contacts', political contacts, and diplomatic contacts. It shows how political and diplomatic face-to-face contacts with the dissidents increased in frequency and scope during the 1980s, and how ministers' and diplomats' contacts furthered each other. Finally, it discusses possible explanations for this change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Freedom & Solidarity / Wolność i Solidarność is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jaroslav Bařinka, a leading Czech scholar of Koreanology, founding figure of Koreanology in Czechoslovakia, and among the longest–serving Czech diplomats operating in both Koreas, died at the age of eighty–nine on October 3, 2020. Bařinka made invaluable contributions introducing Korean traditional culture, archeology, and literature to non–Korean audiences, based on his extensive travels in the Koreas, Japan, and China spanning half a century. He served as an interpreter and Second Secretary at the Czechoslovak embassy in Pyongyang starting in 1955 and intermittently after that until 1976. He was the first Czech civilian to visit the ROK in 1970, returning there during the 1988 Olympics and in 1991 as Czechoslovakia's—and in 1993 Czechia's—first chargé d'affaires to Seoul. He was famous for his meticulous note–taking, sharp eyes, and technical knowledge. To the moment of his death he could talk at length about metallurgical deposits across Czechia and North Korea, their extraction processes, and their chemical properties—or about Confucian writings and architecture. This article recounts Bařinka's experiences from his long career in Korean scholarship, interpretation and diplomacy, with the aim of shedding light on Czechoslovak–Korean political relations, scholarly and cultural exchanges, and physical encounters from the 1950s to the 2000s. It is a record of conversations based on fifteen long interviews with Bařinka which took place between October 2014 and August 2019, with the objective of tracing the beginnings of Koreanology in Czechoslovakia. The content and style follow Bařinka's presentation as closely as possible, and errors, omissions, and biases are not carefully flagged, with the aim of accurately reflecting Bařinka's own narrative. In instances where editorial intervention is warranted, references to sources of additional information and corroborations of Bařinka's account are separated clearly from Bařinka's own account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jan Kavan (b. 1946) was one of the most active émigrés who fled Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring. As his mother was British, Kavan settled in London. A devout socialist, he founded the Palach Press Agency and established a smuggling network for circulating banned literature to and from Czechoslovakia. Kavan was also active in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement. On his return to Czechoslovakia in 1990, Kavan held several important posts, including that of foreign minister of the Czech Republic and president of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Based largely on archival documents, this essay sheds light on some of the more controversial aspects of Kavan’s personality, life, and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is centered on media coverage of rock music in its broader ideological and political sense, with an emphasis on the institutional frame of Communist media propaganda in the period of normalization, i.e., the final phase of the totalitarian political system that was in control in Czechoslovakia from 1969 to 1989. Rock music was indeed a “problematic” genre for Communist cultural policy because it, allegedly, promoted the destabilization of Communist ideological and aesthetic norms. To counteract this, Communists started using propagandist campaigns to manipulate media portrayal of rock music and its protagonists through developing wide range of censorship mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Czech Republic privatised industrial enterprises rapidly but kept state control of its big banks, which were expected to finance the transition to a market economy. The outcomes were not entirely successful, certainly not for the banks themselves, which ended up technically bankrupt and were eventually sold to foreign investors. This study analyses the actions of bank managers and the policies of government to understand what went wrong, based on personal interviews with top managers and bank financial statements. It concludes that state ownership of banks was adverse to their performance, and that the implicit contract between bank managers and government ministers (‘you make risky loans and we'll get growth now and bail you out later if we need to’) did not work. Conflict between government's objective to finance the transition and banks' private profit objective might be resolved with clearer channels for government influence, better functioning markets and institutions, and bank managers with market economy experience. Lessons learned from the Czech experience apply not only to future cases of banks in transition economies but also to business relationships with government generally in turbulent times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]