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Czech football champions Viktoria Plzeň played in their first-ever Champions League group stage match on Tuesday, facing off against Belarus’s BATE Borisov. Buoyed by a goal from Marek Bakoš late in the first half, the club showed plenty of spark, but the more experienced Belorussian team came back, leading to a 1:1 draw.

The future of the Czech Republic’s largest public tender is uncertain after the Finance Ministry revealed that three firms had bid between 57 and 65 billion crowns to remove environmental damage inherited from the communist regime. Prime Minster Petr Nečas, as well as several other cabinet ministers are increasingly receptive to arguments by the project’s critics who warned the tender might become the country’s “largest single corrupt deal”.

As the Czech government debates a controversial eco-tender on the clean-up of environmental pollution caused under the communist regime, the daily Právo has published a surprising story. Over 100 barrels of the toxic substance beryllium are reportedly being loaded on trucks in Kiev, Ukraine to be transported to a secret destination in the Czech Republic.

A novel titled “Secret Book” has been flying off the shelves in Czech bookstores. In it, author Irena Obermannová describes her secret affair with a figure that she refers to as “the greatest Czech.” The author is known for her very open, often autobiographical style of writing – and since the book’s male protagonist shares many traits with former president Václav Havel, there is heated speculation over the veracity of her account. Culture and society journalist Jana Ciglerová talks about the juicy bestseller.

An anti-Romany march organized by a far-right party escalated when radicals were joined by locals in an attempted attack on a Romany housing unit in a small town in North Bohemia on Saturday. The event was only the latest in a series of racially-motivated incidents that have occurred in the region in recent weeks, where racial tensions between the Czech and Romany communities have been acerbated by high unemployment and a rise in crime.

A shocking new AIDS campaign comparing risky behavior to suicide aims to remind Czechs that the danger of HIV infection has not gone away. The NGO Art for Life, which is behind the campaign, says that the public, which has long grown careless of the danger, needs to be jolted into awareness of what is at stake.

The civilian intelligence agency, BIS, has issued a scathing report on malpractice and criminal activity within the Czech justice system. The agency’s annual report accuses judges and state prosecutors of a litany of shortcomings from sluggishness to connections to organised crime. On Thursday the Czech judges’ association went on the offence, comparing the allegations to a baseless tabloid report.

The Czech Republic is mourning the loss of its three ice hockey stars in a plane crash that will be remembered as one of the worst sporting tragedies in history. Jan Marek, Karel Rachůnek and Josef Vašíček were among the 43 victims of Wednesday’s tragic plane crash in Russia which wiped out the entire Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team.

A new study has raised serious questions about diet and fitness in the Czech military after revealing that half of the army’s 22,000 soldiers are overweight. The alarming result means the military will introduce a low-fat diet, likely boost fitness testing and provide troops with fat-fighting pills. The last measure, though, has come under criticism – with many experts suggesting that medicine should only be used as a last resort.

The lower house of parliament on Tuesday gave final approval to a bill which will provide local administrations with the means to fight air pollution more effectively. In the event of a smog alert mayors can order the biggest pollutants to scale down production, ban high-emissions cars from city centres and scrap toll on ring roads in order to reduce the amount of traffic. Town mayors and environment activists had long been pushing for the amendment and Radio Prague asked Vojtěch Kotecký from Friends of the Earth how effective he thinks it will