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The daily Mladá fronta Dnes on Thursday revealed that a former Prague district mayor had been intensively monitored by a detective agency four years ago. On Friday the plot thickened, with the paper asserting that a multitude of officials at the Prague 11 town hall had been clandestinely investigated and that detectives with ties to the coalition’s Public Affairs party were responsible. Both the government and the opposition are now calling for answers.

The post of United States ambassador to Prague has gone unfilled since the start of 2009, when the previous, George Bush-appointed ambassador was recalled. Now it appears the job will remain vacant for even longer, after the Obama administration’s choice for envoy to the Czech Republic was rejected in the US Senate.

One of the most violent cases of attempted robbery seen in the Czech Republic in some years took place on Thursday. A man who tried to rob an exchange office in the town of Krnov was detained by customers and staff, but when he was being arrested, a grenade went off, killing the perpetrator and injuring six others, four of them police officers.

A plaque was unveiled in Prague on Thursday to a fascinating figure of modern Czech history, General Alois Eliáš. General Eliáš, who had fought in the Czechoslovak Legions in the first world war, was appointed prime minister during the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in the second. While in that post he worked with the resistance – and became the only head of government of an occupied state to be executed by the Nazis.

The government has answered local council calls they be given more powers to stamp out gaming machine or so-called herna bars across the country. Proposed legal changes seek to put some order into a chaotic and poorly regulated multi-billion crown sector which many suspect is a front for criminal activity and money laundering.

Prague’s Galerie Rudolfinum has officially opened one of its most ambitious projects to date: the exhibition Decadence Now! Visions of Excess, looking at the use of decadence in contemporary art. The show – featuring work by such artists as Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and the late Robert Mapplethorpe – will shock some but enthuse others, and in all cases draw a strong response.

A war of words has erupted between the two Czechs charged with steering the country’s external relations: the president and foreign minister. The clash stems from concerns that the Czech opt-out from the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty demanded by President Václav Klaus might not be looking so solid.

Tuesday was a state holiday in the Czech Republic, the Day of Czech Statehood, which marks the feast day of the patron Saint Václav, or Wenceslas. While it has always been a red-letter day for Czech Roman Catholics, who commemorate the martyr’s murder in the year 935, it is only in recent years that the date has gained in political significance. This year the office of the government marked the occasion with a special ceremony to return an 80 year old film epic about the holy monarch to the screen.

More than 2,000 astronauts, engineers and scientists are currently rubbing shoulders at the Prague Congress Centre, for the annual International Astronautical Congress. The meeting, being held here for the first time since 1977, covers subjects as diverse as the future of the International Space Station and whether there’s life on Mars.

The Czech Film and Television Academy has made its choice for which film to send to the 2011 Academy Awards, putting its trust once again in director Jan Hřebejk for his drama Kawasaki’s Rose. That Mr Hřebejk has Oscar potential we already know – his WWII drama Divided We Fall was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2000 – but was Kawasaki’s Rose indeed the best candidate for an Oscar on offer; that’s a question I put to film critic Ilona Francková.