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The Czech Jewish writer, Arnošt Lustig died in Prague on Saturday at the age of 84. A survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, he made the Holocaust the central theme of his work that includes novels Dita Saxová, A Prayer for Kateřina Horovitzová, Lovely Green Eyes, and many others. He also worked as a reporter at Radio Prague in the 1950s.

The Czech Statistical Office is gearing up for the 2011 population and housing census which is to take place on March 25th-26th. The massive undertaking involving thousands of people took five years to prepare and is preceded by a nationwide media campaign.

Prague is remembering the long winter of Communism this week with an unusual multi-media festival called Mene Tekel. Hebrew for ‘the writing on the wall’, the festival – now in its fifth year - bills itself as ‘an international festival against totalitarianism, evil and violence’. Films, concerts, exhibitions and even reconstructions of Stalinist show trials are on hand in what the organisers say is an attempt to preserve the memory of the nation.

The Czech annual Anděl music awards for 2010 were handed out on Wednesday. Three prizes went to the band Nightwork which parodies the 1980s. The Anděl awards highlighted some interesting music endeavours in 2010 but critics say they fail to reflect what’s really progressive in Czech pop music.

The Czech Republic has just received the sort of global recognition it could do without – placed second in a world ranking of alcohol consumption in a World Health Organisation study. And local alcoholism experts say problem drinking is on the increase as Czechs seek an easy solution to increased stress and other problems.

Around 150 people, self-professed Jedi knights (members of a fictional order made famous in George Lucas’ Star Wars films) are attempting to found an official church of ‘Jediism’ in the Czech Republic. The idea was inspired by a facebook group of more than 30,000 people earlier who registered as Jedi in the Czech census. While that was largely an attempt at humour, the main organiser behind the project to found an actual church says that’s no joke.

Hundreds of people came to see the carnival, or Shrovetide processions at the open-air museum at Veselý Kopec, near Hlinsko in eastern Bohemia, on Saturday. It was the first opportunity to see the centuries-old folk tradition after it was added to the UNESCO list of world heritage.

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski is on a two-day state visit to the Czech Republic, beginning with a meeting with his Czech counterpart Václav Klaus. As Poland prepares to assume the EU’s rotating presidency in July, the heads of state discussed ways to promote their common interests in the Union, but also made their first comments on events in Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world, sparing little criticism for the West’s handling of the situation.

The Czech government has agreed the main lines of one of its most ambitious reforms, that of the creaking pension system. But the formula advanced seems to have won few friends. Trade union leaders say it goes too far and some leading economists say it does not go far enough.

The daily Mladá fronta Dnes on Friday published the story of an 11-year-old boy who was confined to a psychiatric ward for six months after the court found his mother unfit to care for him and he refused to see his father. For most of that time, he was allowed to see his mother for only an hour a week and was kept in harsh institutional conditions despite the fact that he is completely healthy mentally and physically. What’s more, Alan is not the only child in the country who has been institutionalised because of his parents’ problems. There may