Society

When a young ODS member challenges Fiala to smoke a joint and ODS suddenly talks about legalization, it is clear that marijuana is no longer just a pirate issue. Fiala smilingly declined the offer, but his surprisingly accommodating response signaled a shift. At the same time, ODS launched a campaign with the slogan \"now is the time for legalization\", a clear ploy to appeal to young voters and disillusioned Pirate supporters.

Czechia ranked 26th out of 30 countries in this year’s Nanny State Index, maintaining its reputation of lifestyle freedom, but continuing to fall in the rankings. The higher a country ranks, the more regulated its lifestyle is. Our country’s approach to regulating food, beverages, alcohol, and electronic cigarettes remains largely liberal. However, in 2017, Czechia was the most liberal country in the ranking.

A new Pope is about to assume his office, but what once was a greatly influential position, making and breaking kingdoms, is becoming obsolete, at least in the Western world. Should a new Pope change that? The relevance of the Pope is hard to measure, but for those interested in number-crunching, several metrics are available.

If you have lived in Hungary in the last 10 years, you sure have gotten used to living with the constant presence of fear by now. We are afraid of Soros, afraid of the Brussels bureaucrats threatening our sovereignty, afraid of the \"pro-war liberals\" and most importantly, we are afraid of \"migrants\". There were several enemies introduced to the Hungarian population by the governing Fidesz-KDNP party alliance, including \"migrants\".

One of the quickest and easiest ways to bring health services closer to consumers is to extend the ability to sell selected over-the-counter (OTC) medications in retail outlets while expanding the competencies of pharmacies. In terms of the openness of OTC medication sales, there are no uniform rules across Europe. About half of European countries allow OTC medicines to be sold outside pharmacies under various conditions.

In debates over immigration, one key fact often gets lost: the Czech Republic needs foreign workers. Without them, the economy would stall. The Czech labor market is tight. Unemployment has hovered near record lows for years—around 3% or less, one of the lowest rates in the EU. That might sound like good news, but it hides a structural problem: there are simply not enough people to fill the jobs.

Writing and written symbols accompany us everywhere—from shopping and street signs to the public realm and our homes. Language\'s complex encoding is so multifaceted that entire libraries could be filled with treatises on its origins, meaning, purpose, and relevance. Yet, writing and the ability to read and write are above all instruments of freedom.

Twenty years ago, politics was the domain of debate, analysis, and long-form interviews. But today, in an era of short-form content and the dominance of TikTok in particular, has it become a spectacle? Algorithms favor viral content, politicians adapt to trends, and voters make decisions based on catchy messages rather than in-depth arguments.

We know that disinformation as a tool of war is conducted in the shadow of war in the sense that it is a continuous, systematic, and diversified process, used not only during wartime but also—perhaps primarily—during \"peacetime.\" In modern armed conflict, disinformation is the strategic use of false or misleading information to influence perceptions of reality, behaviors, and military outcomes.

Artificial intelligence and robots will soon create prosperity that will make human work superfluous, not to mention that there will not even be a place to work as we will become redundant. Echoing his earlier predictions, Elon Musk added that people will be able to stop working if everyone is paid a \"universal high income\". Not a \"universal basic income\", he argued, but a \"universal high income\".