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Tuesday evening saw Champions League action in the Romanian capital, with football’s Steaua Bucharest hosting Czech club Slavia Prague. The Czech side needed to eke out a win or at least a tie in order to keep its hopes alive – if not for the knockout stages of the Champions League – than at least for the next best thing: a place in the UEFA CUP.

Czechs are never happier than when they’re heading off into the woods with a basket for mushrooms and a pocket knife, and politicians have traditionally shied away from reforming how forests are owned and managed. So an announcement made by Agriculture Minister Petr Gandalovic on Friday was surprising: the government, he said, was considering selling off some of the country’s state-owned forests to private companies. I spoke to Vojtech Kotecky of the Friends of the Earth organisation, which is very much against the idea.

It has taken the Green Party almost two months to come up with a candidate for the post of education minister, and yet, the Greens are deeply divided over the issue. It is not the candidate himself, however, that seems to be causing the controversy but rather the way the Green Party leaders are putting their proposals through. This could prove to be the final straw to the integrity of the smallest coalition party.

Cash-strapped Czech filmmakers have found a new source of income for at least the next three years. Last Thursday, President Klaus signed a so-called digital amendment, which will secure income from advertisements shown on Czech public television. The subsidies will be available until analogue broadcasting is switched off, which is going to happen in October 2010. Altogether they should amount to at least 425 million crowns (24 million US dollars). I spoke to Tomas Baldynsky from the State Fund for Support and Development of Cinematography and

Jaroslav Skala, a world pioneer in alcohol addiction treatment, died in Prague on Monday at the age of 91. He will be remembered as the man who founded the very first alcohol detox centre in the country, a doctor who turned teetotaler to help his patients, an internationally recognized specialist known as “the father of detox”.

The governing Civic Democrats held their national congress in Prague on Saturday. The conference, which is normally viewed as a forum for debate, served more this year as a reflection upon the party’s last few months in government. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek called for more party unity, but praised the Civic Democrats for unanimously backing current president Vaclav Klaus in his bid to win another term. Mr Topolanek set out to display his strong leadership at the conference, but there could be a few cracks showing:

The New York-Ukrainian rock group Gogol Bordello describe their music as “Gypsy punk”. It is perhaps appropriate then that they have hooked up with Gipsy.cz; the Czech Romany rapper has done a special remix of the track Alcohol on the Czech release of the band’s latest LP. I discussed that collaboration and more with Gogol Bordello singer Eugene Hutz.

This weekend a painting by a famous French Fauvist painter Maurice de Vlaminck was sold at an auction in Prague’s Dorotheum for 5.3 million crowns (approximately 280,000 US dollars). Even though it was valued at 7 million crowns, in the end it only slightly exceeded the starting price. Vlaminck’s “Landscape with Buildings”, dating back to 1914, has thus become the 13th most expensive work of art to be sold at a Czech auction. The head of the auction house Marie Galova says it is not easy to explain the lack of interest on the part of buyers but

In just a few weeks the Czech Republic will lift its border controls as the country joins the Schengen area. However, that doesn’t mean Czechs will be allowed to cross the borders wherever they want to. Sumava National Park, stretching along the German and Austrian borders, has decided to exclude part of the German frontier from the border-free zone. Regional politicians and tourists are very much against the idea, arguing that the former Iron Curtain is now being transformed into a new “green curtain”. R.F. talked to Radovan Holub, the National

The consumption of marihuana in the Czech Republic along with other illicit substances has dropped, according to the annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction published on Thursday. Despite this, young Czech adults of up to 24 years of age consume more marihuana than their peers anywhere else in Europe.