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Police on Thursday charged a 41-year-old man with murder and rape of nine-year-old Anna J. who went missing in the Prague neighbourhood of Trója in October. Her body was found some 800 metres from the place where she was last seen. The man has been the main suspect in the case ever since his DNA was found on the girl’s abandoned schoolbag.

Guided tours with a difference have been launched in Prague – instead of highlighting the attractive cultural monuments favoured by the usual tour guides they put the spotlight on those examples of urban blight, dilapidation and thoughtless construction. And the ugly face of the capital’s development provides no shortage of routes.

The famous Jurkovič House in Brno, belonging to the Moravian Gallery in Brno, will reopen to the public in roughly two week’s time following extensive renovation. Designed by the Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič and dating back to 1906, the Art Nouveau villa – which makes marked use of rustic or folklore elements – will serve as a multiple-purpose museum for the gallery. The building ranks as a gem of early 20th century architecture, ranking similarly in importance to the Villa Tugendhat. A little earlier the gallery’s deputy director Kateřina Tlachová

Two army aircraft left Prague for Japan on Tuesday evening to bring back selected Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, primarily women and children, from the disaster-stricken main island of Honshu. Among the evacuees are roughly half of the members of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, which was supposed to be touring the country for another week after the earthquake struck. Just over a hundred people have been evacuated, with a promise of more army flights if the situation requires.

Prague’s Café Braun will host an unusual event this week; each evening members of the public will be invited to sit down over coffee or a glass of wine with a leading scientist, to discuss some of the exciting developments in their field. The event’s called ‘a Week of Science Cafés’, and it’s part of a broader campaign by the NGO Czech Head to try and popularise science.

The Czech Constitutional Court ruled on Monday that the government’s austerity package, adopted in late 2010, was approved in breach of the constitution. The package, which slashed social and other benefits to lower the deficit in public finances, was pushed through Parliament after having called a “legislative emergency”. The court said this was unacceptable, and gave the government until the end of the year to have the laws re-approved.

The Czech defence Minister Alexandr Vondra, has suspended from office the head of the Czech military police and two high-level commanders over an unprecedented incident on Friday at the headquarters of public broadcaster Czech TV. Early in the evening - as the station aired its primetime news broadcast - nine masked and heavily armed members of a military command unit forced their way into the news building, pushing past security guards and jumping turnstiles.

The Czech coalition government has backtracked on its plan of how to pay for an overhaul of the country’s pension system. The basic concept of the reform – the addition of private pension funds into the system – remains unchanged. Under pressure from all sides, however, coalition leaders now propose a lower hike in the value added tax than originally planned.

The Czech government has outlined the country’s stance ahead of an upcoming extraordinary EU summit that will deal with the situation in Libya and other North African countries. President Václav Klaus, who will head the Czech delegation, will tell his counterparts from other EU countries in Brussels on Friday that Prague will only support measures approved by the UN Security Council. But critics say that the Czech Republic, and the West, is again doing too little, too late.

Government moves to marry pension reform and large hikes in Value Added Tax are looking increasingly ragged. Leaders of the main coalition parties are meeting on Thursday to decide their final stance over what was supposed to be an already done deal. And the increasingly under pressure finance minister has walked into a row with editors of newspapers and news weeklies over the impact of the VAT hike on the press.