Current Affairs | All stories

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel was awarded the first ever Ambassador of Conscience award by the human rights organization Amnesty International in the Irish capital, Dublin on Thursday night. The title for the award was inspired by a poem written by the Irish Nobel Literature Laureate Seamus Heaney to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Amnesty International in 1986.

A new survey released on Thursday by the TNS Factum agency claimed that the Communist Party has now well and truly overtaken the largest party in the coalition government, the Social Democrats, leading them by four points. Other polls taken over the last few months have produced similar results - the Communists appear to have consolidated their position as the second strongest force in the land. But is this just a case of lies, damn lies, and opinion polls? We asked analyst Tomas Sedlacek.

Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, the Champs Elysees in Paris, London's Oxord street - these and other swanky avenues regularly finish at the top of a survey called Main Streets Across the World, published annually by real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker. The latest survey out this week has shown Prague's own Na Prikope Street has made it to the top 18. Jan Velinger spoke with Jonathan Hallett, the head of the Prague branch of Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker. He began by asking the realties expert whether Na Prikope Street's placing

A new book entitled "Students and Communist Rule between 1968 and 1989" has just appeared on the bookshelves. The aim is to highlight the special role Czech students played not only in overthrowing the communist regime fourteen years ago, but throughout the totalitarian era.

The cabinet decided on Wednesday to reject an opposition proposal calling for victims of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion to receive compensation from the state. The proposal, put forward by the main opposition Civic Democrat party, said victims and their immediate families should be compensated for the deaths and injuries that accompanied the 1968 invasion.

Brass-band music has a long history in the Czech Republic. In fact, some of the world's best known marching songs were first written and played in this country. Today, however, brass-band music or "dechovka", as it is known here, is apparently facing something of a crisis.

Visitors admiring the beauty of Prague's spires and the colourful facades of its historic buildings are often in for an unpleasant surprise. Prague residents learnt long ago that it's safest to walk around the city with their eyes down. That's because the streets of the capital are often littered with dog excrement, which the city authorities spend tens of millions of crowns a year cleaning up. The money from dog licences is used to clean up the dog mess, though it is not enough. The city council has now proposed the licence fee be increased by

Moving on to some good news for Czech football fans, especially those who couldn't get tickets for September's Euro 2004 qualifier against Holland, because Prague's 20,000-capacity Letna stadium was sold-out. Prague City Council on Tuesday expressed its support for the building of a new 50,000 thousand-seat national sports stadium in the city's Strahov district.

A new political scandal appears to be brewing this week, after Social Democrat MP Josef Hojdar announced that police had discovered a bugging device in his car. The MP has been saying for some time that the intelligence services are bugging him, an accusation they categorically deny. So who's behind it?

This week visitors to Prague's Svanda Theatre are being treated to a feast of Balkan music, with the launch of a new CD by the band Gothart. In the northern climes of the Czech Republic this is not a traditional sound - associated more with sand and sea and summer holidays on the Adriatic where Czech tourists flock in their hundreds of thousands every summer. But what's unusual about this recording is that all the musicians are Czech. David Vaughan asked world music expert Petr Doruzka for his impressions of the new CD, and started with its rather