Current Affairs | All stories

The Czech energy giant ČEZ announced on Thursday it was cancelling a tender on two new nuclear reactors at the Temelín nuclear power plant. The deal - estimated as worth hundreds of billions of crowns - was shelved a day after the government stated it would not offer any state guarantees in the project. There were two remaining bidders in the deal, the US-based Westinghouse and Russian-led consortium MIR 1200, who have been left empty-handed.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been in Prague on Thursday for talks with the Czech prime minister and other senior officials. Naturally Russian aggression towards Ukraine has been on the agenda, but the alliance’s secretary general has also been trying to persuade Prague to boost its military spending.

A guide to the nation’s capital under Nazi occupation has won the top Czech literary award. Guide to Protectorate Prague, which provides details of hundreds of locations and events that occurred in the capital during the war, picked up the main prize at Tuesday’s Magnesia Litera awards, along with the prize for best non-fiction book of 2013.

Travellers world-wide have grown increasingly accustomed to checking tourist website TripAdvisor when planning vacations and also ranking top destinations they visited. The annual Travelers’ Choice survey where cities are ranked by visitors themselves, have just been announced. The good news? Prague ranked fifth out of 25 top destinations listed.

Just a few weeks ago the author of one of this season’s biggest literary sensations - Altschulova Metoda – was a mystery, a certain Chaim Cigan, an alleged émigré to Canada who spent much of his career translating technical writing. It turns out it was only a pen name, one that didn’t last.

Last week a camera trap captured an image of a wolf crossing a clearing in a wooded area near Doksy in North Bohemia. Wolves disappeared from Bohemia in the late 19th century and the new photo confirms speculation about the animal’s return to this part of the world.

In recent days, the country’s finance minister, Andrej Babiš and Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka have traded words in the media over serious issues in which they fail to see eye-to-eye, such as bailing out the troubled Paskov mine or providing a billion in support for hospitals. All at a time when Mr Babiš is looking to save billions in the state budget.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is in Prague for two days of talks with Czech top officials and a series of informal public appearances ranging from a lecture at Charles University to a walk-about in the city centre to inspect Prague’s flood barriers. One of his first meetings upon arrival on Thursday was with Czech Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek. I asked the Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Johana Grohová what was at the centre of interest of the talks.

The centre-left Czech government is facing one of its biggest tests since it was formed at the start of the year with a clear split between the Social Democrats of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and his coalition partners over proposals to extend the life of a coal mine earmarked for closure. The split and well as media revelations are focusing renewed attention on the dubious circumstances of the privatization of the OKD mining company a decade ago. The transaction was pushed through by then finance minister, Bohuslav Sobotka.

In recent years there has been a rise in the number of outdoor advertisements in Russian, English and other languages in the Czech Republic, to the annoyance of many locals. Now a new bill has been put forward regulating such ads. If passed, the legislation will allow local authorities to ban any foreign-language adverts displayed in public that are not accompanied by the same text in Czech.