Current Affairs | All stories

Czech officials have tried - and tried again - to stamp out football hooliganism, but at last, say observers, a step in the right direction. On Monday, Czech police and the Czech Football Association (ČMFS) signed an agreement shifting responsibility for security to individual clubs. While the police will continue to monitor key games from outside stadiums, they will only move in if a situation gets out of hand.

If you are a writer or translator in the Czech Republic, then about the biggest accolade you can get is a Magnesia Litera award. The eighth annual Magnesia Litera was launched on Tuesday, with organizers saying they had more than 320 new Czech releases to read their way through and judge. Awards are given for the best new Czech fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and translation, with the Czech public also voting for their own favourite book of the year. The winners will be revealed at a glitzy ceremony in Prague next month, hosted by Czech

Slowly but surely a schedule on the future of the Lisbon treaty – the document aimed at reforming the running of the European Union – is being hammered out. On Sunday, on behalf of the Czech EU presidency Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra met for talks in Ireland with Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin. Last June Irish voters rejected the treaty, now things are gearing up for a possible second referendum in late 2009.

The Czech government approved on Monday a set of measures to boost the country’s economy, ranging from lowering social insurance to higher spending on education, science and research. If the plan is approved by Parliament this week, the government will spend more than 40 billion crowns, or over 1.7 billion US dollars on the package.

A street in Prague has been renamed in honour of a Polish man who committed suicide in protest at the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ryszard Siwiec set himself alight in a Warsaw stadium in September 1968, and died four days later. His protest was long covered up by the communist authorities, and only recently have details begun to emerge.

Baby boxes first came into use in the Czech Republic in 2005, offering mothers unwilling to care for their newborn an anonymous and above all safe means of giving up their baby. Fifteen newborns have been saved since. But the most recent case, this January, is more unusual than most. First, the young mother who gave up her baby is now being investigated by the police. Second, she has changed her mind and told the media she wants her baby back.

Prague, as any Czech schoolchild will tell you, is west of Vienna, and Czechs get notably prickly when their country is placed in “Eastern” rather than “Central” Europe. So there were loud murmurings of disapproval in the Czech media this morning after Russia’s foreign minister Sergej Lavrov spoke of the Czech Republic and Poland as being in “Eastern Europe”.

A new exhibition on the legacy of Jan Ámos Komenský, usually known abroad as Comenius, opened in Prague on Wednesday. An accompanying event of the Czech presidency of the European Union, the exhibit seeks to look at the history, and presence, of Czech education, and its impact on Europe.

Uncertainty over American plans to build an anti-missile system that would be part based in the Czech Republic has not been dispelled after a meeting between the Czech foreign minister and his US counterpart in Washington. America has, however, for the first time admitted the possibility that the project may not go ahead, with Hillary Clinton saying it now hinges on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The head of the Czech Catholic Church, Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, has joined criticism of Pope Benedict XVI over his decision to lift the excommunication of several bishops, including a notorious Holocaust denier. Meanwhile, a search has reportedly begun for his successor at the helm of Czech Catholics.