Current Affairs | All stories

A district court in the Moravian town of Breclav has passed an unprecedented verdict. It sent a mother and father to prison for allowing their three children to skive off school. But perhaps it will not be the last such court ruling, as the case of this Breclav family is not an isolated one.

At the weekend a second attempt to form a new government was made all the more complicated; it was revealed that an advisor to Civic Democrat Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, had intimated the party were preparing to dupe the Social Democrats. The advisor, Marek Dalik, later denied this. However, his words had been secretly recorded by newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes and were broadcast on TV. Despite this evidence, the prime minister is standing by his advisor. The question now is: what further impact will there be?

A special prize was presented to Jiri Novak on Saturday, at the Golden Canary awards for Czech tennis player of the year. The award was in recognition of all that Novak achieved during a long professional career, which recently came to an end when he played his last tournament, the Swiss Indoors in Basle.

With over 1,000 roles in his relatively short life, Vladimir Mensik was one of the country's most celebrated actors and entertainers. He performed on stage, in films, fairy tales, serials, sketches, and one-man shows. In fact, he was the first to introduce a form of stand-up comedy to the nation. A new book that has just hit the shelves takes a closer look at the man that Vladimir Mensik was. Through testimony from his relatives and some forty actors who worked with him, author Jolana Matejkova takes a fresh look at the man who always met people

After what initially appeared to be a breakthrough in government negotiations last week, politicians in the Czech Republic are back at square one. On Sunday the Social Democrats led by Jiri Paroubek rejected a proposal by Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek to join a four-party coalition that would have run the country until 2008. The party rejected the deal on the grounds that a year-an-a-half or so in office was simply too short. Trust, or lack of it, may also have played a part, after it came to light that a close aide to the prime minister had made

A new annual report released by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the EMCDDA, includes some shocking statistics. In the Czech Republic, 22 percent of people between 15 and 34 have tried marihuana at least once. Compared to the other 24 states in the European Union, the Czech Republic ranks first and is on par with the United States.

In the United States, Thanksgiving - one of the nation's most important holidays - is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. In Prague this year, numerous establishments catered to Americans far from home by serving up traditional Thanksgiving food and hosting full-fledged turkey dinners. Emily Udell checked out a few Thanksgiving celebrations in Prague.

Many visitors to Prague will easily recall the capital's National Museum - the neo-Renaissance building that crowns the top of Wenceslas Square. Over a hundred years old, it features exhibitions and boasts a massive natural history collection. But, what goes on display is only a fraction of the museum's collection and in this respect the organisation couldn't have gotten better news this week. Confirmation it would gain use of a neighbouring site that once housed Czechoslovakia's Federal Parliament and currently is home to Radio Free Europe.

Czechs need a visa to travel to the United States, despite many years of campaigning to be allowed to join the US visa waiver program. It is a sensitive issue for the Czech Republic, and often comes up when senior Czech officials meet their American counterparts. Now a new scheme will allow some Czech businesspeople to travel to the US with more freedom.

Frantisek Kupka and Otto Gutfreund are two of the most important Czech artists of the first half of the 20th century; Kupka was a great painter and graphic artist, while Gutfreund is best known for his sculptures. Both men studied in Paris and both fought for France in the first world war, as members of the Czechoslovak Legions. An exhibition of their work from the period 1914 to 1918 has just opened at Prague's Kampa Museum.