Dear readers,

I wish all of you all the best for the coming year. As you have noticed we have slightly changed the layout of the cover and this has mostly met with a positive reaction.

In addition to continuing our themes about and for young people, we have started a topic about women. Naturally, we do not wish to exclude men. On the contrary, we will be pleased if you write and tell us your opinions and experiences, and a series about men may follow.

There is also the category of senior citizens, who in the Czech Republic are quite pushed to the edge of society and, like children, are sometimes (often?) treated as they they are incapable of directing their own lives. We also want to devote ourselves to this matter (in issue 11 we published an article entitled Go Back To the Grave!) and contribute to the discussion of how people of all ages can mutually understand and respect one another.

Some of us read the bible and try to keep the ten commandments, some go to church (whether Catholic, protestant, or some other), while others do not. However, we are all small grains on the large beach known as the world, and it will be a good thing if we stop throwing bombs at one another and tolerate individual differences, whether these be of age, nationality, or religion...After all, if there were not such differences, and we were all almost the same, then the world would be very boring...

When I open the papers, I mostly read that someone somewhere has murdered someone, or someone has defrauded a group of people. It has been written many times that this is because people want to read such news. They are allegedly not interested in the fact that there are people around the world who are pleasant and helpful, who do their work honestly and to the best of their abilities, but, because they are not ambitious, do not get any medals, so they do not get written about.

Our aim is to write about positive things and about people who have achieved something and who do not care whether they receive a medal, because they do what they do for the love of it.

We warmly congratulate the new king of football Pavel Nedved and the queen of skiing Katerina Neumannova. And we thank them and all the other wonderful and good people whom I meet, or know of, for giving us optimism and providing a counterweight to all those awful pieces of news, which unfortunately are also true.