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Prague this week hosted the 12th annual meeting of the European Nuclear Energy Forum, an opportunity for those in government, the industry, regulators, and European authorities to get together and try to plot the future for one of the continent’s key industries and energy sources. The room for cutting construction costs and how to deal with highly radioactive nuclear waste were two of the main subjects for debate this year.

The country’s most notorious prisoner, Jiří Kajínek, is a free man: on Tuesday he was released from prison after receiving a presidential pardon. He spent 23 years of his life sentence for two contract killings in the 1990s. The president said in April he was not convinced of Mr Kajínek’s guilt and Kajínek himself always denied committing the crimes.

The Prague branch of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences has just bestowed its annual awards to nine well-known figures who have served to promote Czech science and culture at the international level. The recipients include filmmaker Ivan Passer and top plastic surgeon Bohdan Pomahač.

The Anděl music awards were handed out on Monday in a special and refreshingly toned-down ceremony broadcast by Czech TV. This year the awards were handed out not at a large theatre but a famous Prague club – Lucerna Music Bar – an ideal venue for more immediate live performances.

The terror attack in Manchester dominated news coverage in the Czech Republic on Tuesday with politicians and ordinary people expressing shock and condolences to the families of the victims. The Czech Foreign Ministry released an emergency help line for people who have friends and relatives in Great Britain and the Interior Ministry said security would be tightened at concerts and other events with a bigger congregation of people.

War veterans, diplomats and members of the public gathered in the French port of Dunkerque and the Belgian town of De Panne over the weekend to pay homage to the soldiers who lost their lives in the heroic siege of Dunkerque and the liberation of the French-Belgian border areas. Among the heroes of Dunkerque are members of the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade which, although heavily outnumbered, fought to contain German units within the fortress up until their surrender in May, 1945.

Months ago there were reports that the next US ambassador to Prague could be Ivana Trump, the Czech-born ex-wife of President Donald Trump. There are now reports that the next American ambassador will be Steve King. There was some confusion early on Friday, whether the person in question was a US congressman for the state of Iowa or, as it emerged later, a businessman of the same name who contributed to the Trump campaign.

Czech fruit growers are assessing the damage from severe frosts that occurred in country in late April and early May. Initial estimates say the frost has damaged around one quarter of the country’s fruit production, with losses amounting to over 470 million crowns. Czech farmers were hit by frost for the second year in a row; last year’s losses amounted to 400 million crowns.

Scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences have discovered a new antibiotic, which appears to be significantly more effective than any of the commercially used drugs of the same group. The team of experts from the Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre have published their study in the prestigious US journal Chemical Science. I spoke to Lucie Najmanová, who was part of the research team, and asked her to describe the super strong antibiotic, which is called Celin:

Some 1,380 000 people visited Prague in the first quarter of 2017, spending over three million nights in the city, according to data released by Prague City Tourism. After years of downfall in the number of Russian tourists, the office has recorded a significant surge in the number of Russian tourists. I discussed the newly released data with Prague City Tourism’s spokeswoman Barbora Hrubá: