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Wanted? Dead or alive? The fate of the South Stream gas pipeline bringing Russian, or perhaps Caspian, natural gas under the Black Sea is still a moot point it seems.

The biggest player in Czech cyberspace, the local search engine and website Seznam.cz, increased its revenues to three billion crowns this year, compared to 2.9 billion in the previous year. The most popular Czech search engine expects to post a final profit of 930 million crowns for the whole of 2014, Seznam’s general manager Pavel Zima told the Czech News Agency on Thursday.

An ice storm that has affected the Czech Republic in the last couple of days has hit insurers and rail operators, with the latter providing compensation to passengers, but has had little impact on manufacturing and construction firms.

The Czech Construction industry is showing signs of recovery after seven years of falling output. This year’s predicted one percent growth copies a similar trend across Europe. According to Euroconstruct’s forecast for 2015-2017 the lean years for Europe’ construction industry are definitely over.

Black Friday, a day of discounts immediately after Thanksgiving intended to boost sales in the pre-Christmas period, has spread beyond America’s borders, with the UK in particular experiencing shopping fever at the end of last week. The sales drive has also reached the Czech Republic, though there were no scenes of customers coming to blows over TV sets; in this country Black Friday overwhelmingly concerns online retailers.

A dispute over the purchase of land needed for the extension of the D11 motorway from Prague to Hradec Králové in East Bohemia has finally come to an end, after long twenty years of negotiations between the state and the farmer, whose land obstructed the construction.

Czech consumers can look forward to lower electricity bills in 2015. The country’s Energy Regulatory Office on Wednesday announced a 1.2 percent drop in the regulated price of electricity for households which should save consumers hundreds, if not thousands, of crowns annually. Although the regulated component only accounts for 60 percent of the final electricity price, most suppliers have confirmed that the price of electricity will drop.

After the success of its Potrefená husa chain, the Prague-based Staropramen brewery is planning a new network of restaurants under the banner Naše hospoda (Our Pub), Czech news websites have reported.

e-shops in the Czech Republic are expected to get a jump on shopping centres and other outlets in pre-Christmas sales, according to a new poll by GE Money Bank. This will be a first for internet dealers in the country.

In the past, ads which have “won” Sexist Piggy Awards have been largely commercial in nature: scantily-clad women draped over cars or propping up chainsaws or other power tools. While this remains true even now, participants and the jury in this year’s sixth inception noted that exploitative motifs had surfaced in the field of politics. This year’s “winner” is none other than a local branch of the Social Democratic Party, while a student-produced ad for a university, featuring sex in the bathroom, came second.