Current Affairs | All stories

A police crackdown on underage drinking at the early-December holiday of Mikuláš was revealed this week to have been disconcertingly successful. The four-day raid on nearly four thousand bars and restaurants found some 600 intoxicated teens and over 400 infractions of alcohol sales to minors. The finding brings new emphasis to the government’s anti-drug and alcohol strategy, as the director of the government board for drug policy, Jindřich Vobořil, told us when he spoke to Radio Prague about the situation with earlier today.

The Czech doctors’ union reports that roughly a fourth of the country’s 16,000 doctors have pledged to resign their positions through the “Thank You, We’re Leaving” campaign, which demands a rise in the base salaries of hospital doctors. If indeed that number of doctors goes through with the protest, nearly 40% of hospitals in the Czech Republic will be affected. But the Ministry of Health is not flinching. Christian Falvey has the story.

The head of Germany’s biggest and most important region, Bavaria, is making a landmark visit to the Czech Republic. The two-day trip by minister president Horst Seehofer is the first ever being made by a Bavarian premier to its neighbour since the end of WWII. While relations have been complicated by recent history, this visit is putting the accent on the present and future.

Czech heritage preservation officials have launched a new website in the hope of sparking a broad debate on the changing face of Prague. The project’s initiator, art historian Richard Biegel, says that it is time to learn from the city’s mistakes in the past twenty years:

The second annual “Sexist Piggy” awards were handed out this week for the most sexist ads of the year. The contest, organized by the Brno-based NGO Nesehnutí, wants to draw attention to offensive and stereotype depictions of men and women in advertising. This year, the organizers handed out two prizes – one awarded by the public, the other by an expert jury.

Czech Environment Minister Pavel Drobil stepped down on Wednesday. His announcement followed the release of recordings made by the head of a department at his ministry, Libor Michálek, purporting to show Mr Drobil’s advisor pressuring him into corruption aimed at funding the minister’s political career. Another tape appeared to show Mr Drobil offering Mr Michálek a promotion – if he destroyed the original evidence. Pavel Drobil’s Civic Democrat party boss, Prime Minister Petr Necas, is standing by him – and both argue that his only mistake was a poor

Miroslav Tichý was nearly 80 years old when the surreptitious photographs he had taken of women and girls decades earlier were exhibited publicly for the first time. Combined with his story as a tramp-like recluse, the voyeuristic pictures’ eerie quality made Tichý an international art sensation. This week the first Prague exhibition of his work got underway.

The Czech first division football club Brno has not had a good season so far. After a series of humiliating defeats, which have left Brno second from bottom going into the winter break, the patience of the club’s owner is at an end. He has taken the extraordinary step of asking both players and the team’s manager to undergo voluntary lie detector tests.

The Czech environment minister, Civic Democrat Pavel Drobil, has announced his resignation over a corruption scandal at the ministry. Mr Drobil’s decision came hours after the daily Mladá fronta Dnes exposed practices aimed at channelling money from the ministry-controlled State Environmental Fund.

Unusually cold weather has claimed 13 lives in Prague since October – 11 of them in December alone. A combination of hypothermia and alcohol played a role. With severe conditions expected to continue, the question now is how quickly help for the city’s homeless can be provided to try and stop what should be preventable deaths.