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Pranksters from the art group known as Ztohoven made their mark at Prague Castle at the weekend when they replaced the country’s presidential flag with a giant pair of red boxer shorts. The move, the group said, was in direct protest to President Miloš Zeman. His spokesman condemned the act as dishonourable.

The newly-constructed Blanka tunnel complex will open to traffic on Saturday, September 19th. The longest city tunnel in Europe was to have been the pride of Prague, but it has been dogged by problems, opening four years late and way over budget.

The Danish beer company Carlsberg, which distributes the popular Czech Staropramen brew in Sweden, this week recalled all Staropramen beer on tap from 680 Swedish bars and restaurants. The move came after two people tasted the beer and suffered blisters and mouth bleeding as a result.

A new memorial to the world famous graphic designer and artist Ladislav Sutnar has just been unveiled in his birthplace Pilsen. The enlarged set of bright building blocks for kids, designed by Sutnar in the 1920’s, is located in front of Pilsen’s Faculty of Design and Art and is part of a long-term project aimed at reviving Sutnar’s memory in his homeland.

While the immigrant crisis has opened up a wide rift between the Czech Republic and other Central European states on one side and the traditional EU agenda setters in Western Europe, France and Germany on the other, differences within some Czech parties about the crisis and the possible solutions have also emerged.

The Czech Republic is one of a small number of member states holding out against European Union plans for a quota system to share refugees around the bloc. The country’s foreign minister, Lubomír Zaorálek, plays down talk of Brussels withdrawing funds from states that refuse to accept set numbers of migrants – but concedes that Prague may be outvoted over the matter in the not too distant future.

A new exhibition entitled a Brave New World – deliberately evoking the title of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel – has just opened in Prague’s DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Running until mid-January next year, the exhibition is presenting the works of countless artists tasked with bringing to life various dark social themes such as surveillance, consumerism and totalitarian oppression. I spoke with the museum’s director and exhibition curator Leoš Válka and began by asking him to explain the idea behind the presentation.

EU interior ministers on Monday failed to reach agreement on mandatory quotas for the redistribution of 120,000 migrants across the EU. Efforts by West European states to get firm commitments and a timetable for redistribution were blocked by the Czech Republic and three other Višegrad Group states which have refused to accept mandatory quotas on the argument that they simply will not work.

A decision by Germany on Sunday to reintroduce border controls with Austria in the wake of a seemingly endless flow of refugees, mainly comping from Syria, has led to a similar decision being taken by Czech authorities. As of Monday, around two-hundred police have been sent to the Czech-Austrian and also Czech-Slovak borders amidst fears that the German decision could lead to a spike in the numbers of migrants traversing Czech territory.

The foreign ministers of the Visegrad Four countries, Germany and Luxembourg met in Prague on Friday to discuss Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis. Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted on EU states sharing the burden, while his Visegrad counterparts may have shown the first hints of division over the issue of quotas.