Current Affairs | All stories

A fresh survey by the NGO Forum 50%, which strives for equal rights for both genders, suggests that towns and villages in the Czech Republic spend significantly more on men’s needs and interests than women’s. According to the survey, seven out of eight municipalities favored men in their budget distribution. In one case, only 18 percent of a town’s funds went to activities and resources for women. The author of the analysis, Marcela Adamusová, explains the main findings of the study.

Members of a Czech scout group, on a cycling trip in Lithuania, were injured on Sunday after an old building they took shelter in to get out of a rain storm collapsed. The accident happened near the town of Kaunas leaving 11 – including the group’s leader – with serious injuries. Eight remain in hospital, two of them in serious condition.

The Constitutional Court has ruled that Czechs who were stripped of their legal capacity due to conditions such as mental retardation and dementia will not automatically loose their right to vote. Rather, courts will now have to determine on a case-by-case basis whether mentally challenged or ill citizens should be allowed to keep that right. But some experts believe that the verdict still leaves plenty of questions unresolved

Alphonse Mucha’s masterpiece the Slav Epic will not be moved from its temporary home in Moravský Krumlov to Prague for the time being – not before legal questions over its ownership are cleared up- that was the decision by officials on Monday, heeding a call by the painter’s heirs to block anyone from handling the work. The ruling came only hours or so before the first transfer of canvases was to begin; Prague had been hoping to temporarily show them at Veletržní palác.

The annual Summer Film School festival begins on Friday in the Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště. The largest non-competition movie festival in the country has a lot in store for the 3,300 visitors already accredited, namely an astounding array of films, but also special workshops with this year’s star guests, who include British director Ken Loach, and much to do outside the cinema. Earlier today, our reporter Christian Falvey asked the festival’s programme director Jan Jílek how the atmosphere was on the first day.

Milan Paumer, a member of a group who made a dramatic escape from communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, has died in Prague at the age of 79. He, Josef and Ctirad Mašín and their associates were fierce anti-communists and were extremely unusual in taking up arms against the regime. Some Czechs regard Paumer and the rest of the Mašín group as freedom fighters. However, for others they were not heroes but cold blooded killers.

Some people may have thought it was a political blip that would soon lose its allure, but a relative newcomer on the Czech political scene, TOP 09, appears to be going from strength to strength. A recent poll suggests it has eclipsed the two traditional parties on the right and left and is now the people’s favorite.

You might remember the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, where filmmaker Morgan Spurlock spent a month eating nothing but McDonalds; the film documents the drastic effects on his body and soul. There have been several attempts to emulate his experiment, the most recent here in the Czech Republic, when a man spent a month eating nothing but Czech food in pubs and restaurants…and lost six kilos. His diary has now been released as a book.

The General Staff of the Czech Army has had its headquarters on Prague’s Vítězné Náměstí since 1937. It is a massive building which had never been broken into – until last week. Thieves entered the army’s HQ last Thursday night, apparently well aware of where to go and what they wanted. The break-in has left the Czech military embarrassed, but also relieved that apparently no sensitive information was lost.

Archaeologists have just discovered what they say is the first evidence that the Czech Republic’s most important pilgrimage site was inhabited during the era of the Great Moravian Empire; pieces of ceramic material found during a dig at Velehrad are being seen as proof that it was indeed settled in the 9th century.