European agriculture has recently undergone important changes connected with the reorientation of EU policy towards regional, recreational, and land-use subsidies, and owing to the internal divergence in agriculture itself, which has led to large 'industrial' farming companies on the one hand and small, ecological farms on the other. During the period of transformation, the Czech agricultural sector has been forced to confront these changes and full stability remains a long way in the future. Transformation has thus brought both advantages and disadvantages to all the players involved. The former include the existence of large-scale farms, relatively highly skilled workers, and a cheap labour force, which make Czech agriculture competitive on a European scale. On the other hand, Czech attitudes towards work and respect for the property of others are inadequate; production efficiency and quality are low, whereas the expectations of farmers are high. Czech entrepreneurs have opted for relatively strict, unsocial, win-win strategies and understand their business simply in terms of material profit. Conversely, Western businessmen active in the Czech Republic more highly value the long-term profit, social ties and the symbolic functions of agriculture, though that does not mean they would not prefer 'industrial' forms of farming. The main problem of Czech agriculture is thus the absence of family-type farms rooted in their local, social environment, and there is only limited potential for this to develop. Unfortunately, this fact creates the threat of a 'two-speed' European agriculture: the Western model, combining both small and 'industrial' farms, and the Eastern model, focusing solely on extensive large-scale farming.
Základem sebeuvědomění Slovanů byl jejich jazyk. Dějiny Slovanů jsou proto do velké míry dějinami jejich jazyka. Studie sleduje etnogenezi Slovanů do 6. století. Jejich expanze západním a jižním směrem trvala čtyři staletí a Slované v jejím průběhu projevili velkou asimilační schopnost. Je proto možné, že jejich výchozí domovinou bylo malé území. Právní formou asimilace byl tzv. vrv (šňůra) jako symbolicko-sociální fenomén. Příklad vsi Police ve Slovinsku ukazuje, že pro pochopení slovanské etnogeneze je třeba propojit tři interpretační modely: autochtonní, alochtonní a kulturně asimilační. and A foundation of self-understanding of the Slavs was their language. Therefore, the history of the Slavs is to a large extent the history of their language. The article describes their ethnogenezis up to the 6th century. Their expansion to the west and south lasted 400 years, they had a lot of assimilative power. Therefore, it is possible that their homeland was originally a small territory. Juridical form of the assimilation of foreigners was a so-called vrv (rope) as a symbolic-social phenomenon. An example of village Police (Slovenia) suggests that to understand the ethnogenesis of the Slavs a synthesis of three interpretative models – autochthonous, allochthonous, cultural assimilation – is needed.
Ornithologists in Finland recorded the autumn migration of the Red Admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta (L.). In the best year, 1998, 1240 migrants were counted from a bird tower in September. That is, half a million butterflies migrated over a 100-km front. The butterflies were flying above forests riding on cool northerly winds. Radar indicated that a large proportion migrated at high elevations outside the visible range. These records help to resolve an "evolutionary puzzle" of why migrant butterflies and moths travel to northern latitudes when their offspring have limited possibilities of returning south. Until now, the only butterfly for which a high-elevation return migration on northerly winds is known is the American Monarch Danaus plexippus (L.).