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Tomáš Ujfaluši, a member of Czech football’s ‘golden generation’ which featured the likes of players like Milan Baroš, Jan Koller and Pavel Nedvěd, has decided to hang up his boots. The 35-year-old defender, who played for clubs like Fiorentina and Atletico Madrid and had 78 caps for the national squad, called it quits due to a lingering knee-injury which prevented him from fulfilling a one-year contract with Sparta Prague.

For many Czechs, Russia’s Natalya Gorbanevskaya was nothing less than a hero, one of eight people in 1968 who protested on Red Square in Moscow against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. All of the protesters were arrested and as punishment she was sent to a psychiatric hospital. A few years after her release in 1972, she emigrated to France where she continued to work as a poet translator and human rights activist up until her death at the age of 77 last week.

The Czech Defence Ministry says it is close to a deal to sell most of its surplus combat planes. The potential buyer, the US firm Draken International, is reportedly interested in acquiring 28 L-159 planes that would be used as practice targets for US pilots. If agreement is reached, the Defence Ministry will receive around 500 million crowns for the planes.

The government’s agency for social inclusion on Wednesday presented the Rusnok cabinet with a grim report on the situation of the Romany minority, in which it claims that the problems in housing have deteriorated in an alarming way and little progress has been made in other areas. Coincidentally, on the same day, the Senate rejected a proposal by the EC on how to address these issues successfully. I asked the head of the government’s agency for social inclusion Martin Šimácek to outline the main areas of concern.

One of the most compelling Czech documentaries of the year gets a cinema release on Thursday. Show! follows manufactured teen pop group 5Angels as they are drilled for fame by the super ambitious father of one of the young girls. Musicians who have remained popular since the communist era also appear in a film that lifts the lid on the Czech entertainment industry and raises questions about exploitation.

MPs in the newly-elected Chamber of Deputies convened on Wednesday to choose by secret ballot, a new speaker as well as deputy speakers from seven candidates. Jan Hamáček of the Social Democrats was elected chairman by an overwhelming majority. But filling the posts of deputy speakers, by contrast, is likely to be less clear-cut.

Fascinating panoramic photos of abandoned Siberian Gulag camps have just appeared on the Czech website www.gulag.cz. The pictures were taken on the third trip deep into the Taiga by the association Gulag.cz and capture long overgrown labour camps along an uncompleted stretch of railway – a construction project that saw thousands of prisoners, including Czechs, die in appalling conditions. The founder of Gulag.cz, Štěpán Černoušek, explains the thinking behind the unique virtual tour.

Talks on the line-up of a new Czech government have hit a snag. One of the key partners in the emerging coalition, ANO leader Andrej Babiš, is listed as a communist collaborator which would prevent him from holding a ministerial post. The fact that he will not be able to provide a clean screening certificate has revived a debate on whether it may not be time to make a clean break with the past.

Czech astronomers at Ondřejov observatory southeast of Prague, have revealed the Czech observatory was recently the first terrestrial station to record a gamma-ray burst from a hypernova explosion nine billion light-years away. In less than a minute, automated telescopes at Ondřejov turned their sights to the area in question.

Exactly a month after the country’s early general elections, the newly-elected Chamber of Deputies has convened for its opening session. The house will see the swearing in of 200 deputies representing seven parties and decide the fate of one MP whose stint in office may be over before it has started.