Current Affairs | All stories

Good news for Beatles fans – a new exhibition at the Czech Museum of Music opens on Thursday evening featuring the music and the men – the museum’s even borrowed George Harrison’s banjo, one of John Lennon’s shoes, and lots more Beatles memorabilia. The exhibition’s highly interactive however - there’s even a little recording studio where you can try belting out Beatles songs. Earlier we spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Dagmar Fialová.

Heavy rainfall has brought flooding back to the Czech Republic just as some localities were getting back to normal. Many of the same areas in Moravia hit two weeks ago were affected again with three lives lost, but flood warning have also been widened to new areas in the west of the country. The latest floods have left a trail of damage and desperation in their wake.

Three Czech centre-right parties - the Civic Democrats, TOP 09 and the centrist Public Affairs – on Wednesday signed an agreement to create a centre-right coalition of fiscal responsibility. The move was sanctioned by President Václav Klaus, who has so far held off from naming a prime minister designate.

The hedonism of today’s wealthy young Russians is the focus of an exhibition of photographs by Antonín Kratochvíl which has just opened at Prague’s Mánes gallery. In Moscow Nights, he captures scenes of decadence as the city’s “golden youth” cavort in night clubs and even on Stalin’s old yacht. Just ahead of the show’s opening, I asked the great Czech photographer what had drawn him to that subject.

Czech tennis player Tomáš Berdych, seeded 15th at the French Open, has made it to the tournament’s semi-final. On Tuesday he powered past Russia’s Mikhail Youzhny in straight sets. He will next face Robin Söderling of Sweden – a finalist at Roland Garros last year, also on a roll: on Tuesday he ousted the world No. 1 Roger Federer.

One of the people aboard the so-called Freedom Fleet, which was trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, was Czech TV cameraman Jan Línek. He was travelling on one of the smaller boats, several hundred metres away from the Mavi Marmara where several people were killed during a raid by Israeli naval commandoes. Jan Línek was released on Tuesday and returned to Prague later that day.

Prague’s Divadlo na Zábradlí is known mainly for staging former President Havel’s plays but in the last couple of years, it has also focused on producing English-language plays. Thursday will see the premiere of a play acted in English with Czech subtitles on the theatre’s main stage. The play, written by a young Polish author Dorota Maslowska, has a rather complicated title: A Couple of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians in English with Czech Subtitles.

In the Czech general elections, voters shook up the political scene by turning away from the major parties and supporting newcomers. But the change did not stop there: in a new phenomenon of Czech politics, thousands of preferential votes sent many of the old, familiar faces in the lower house home, to be replaced by outsiders from the bottom of party’s ballots.

Following the weekend general elections, Czech right-wing parties are scrambling to capitalize on their gains and reach agreement on a coalition government of fiscal responsibility. Although there is general agreement on the direction the country should take, Monday’s talks indicated that creating a centre-right coalition will be far from easy.

Looking for something to do this summer? How about spending it on board a fully functioning replica of an 18th century sailing ship similar to that captained by the Czech explorer, merchant and privateer Augustine Herman? The cap’n of the good ship La Grace is currently recruiting crew for the 100-foot brig, which will set sail from Suez in Egypt in a few months’ time.