Current Affairs | All stories

The eyes of the Czech Republic today are on the White House where Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is due to hold talks with US President Donald Trump. It is the first visit by a Czech head of government in eight years and the meeting is viewed as a sign of revitalization in Czech-US relations.

Czech Railways management are holding an emergency meeting Wednesday in the wake of back-to-back train collisions and a steep rise in reported accidents and ‘incidents’ – near misses. They will likely agree on stricter safety measures and tighter controls, including reviews of train drivers and key personnel.

After a four-year break, Prague City Hall will once again join the Flags for Tibet initiative, expressing support for Tibetan independence. On Wednesday Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib is also set to meet with the head of the Tibetan government in exile, Lobsang Sangay, who is in the Czech capital to attend the One World Documentary Film Festival.

On Monday, the Czech daily Deník N came out with a story that an official at the Russian Embassy is renting out hundreds of flats owned by the Czech state to tenants in Prague. The flats are available to the Russian state through a decades old agreement, but renting them to third persons may be breaking diplomatic rules.

An exhibition mapping the famous foreign productions of The Bartered Bride, perhaps the most popular Czech opera, gets underway at the Bedřich Smetana Museum in Prague this week. It traces the opera’s journey from its first production abroad, in St Petersburg, across leading opera houses all over the world.

At their party congress this weekend, the Social Democrats re-elected Minister of Interior Jan Hamáček chairman and elevated rising political star Minister of Foreign Affairs Tomáš Petříček to deputy chairman. Delegates also endorsed a revised party platform, representing a shift some observers view as more radically left, other towards a mainstream European centre. Regardless, will it be enough to revive the party’s popularity?

The Czech Society for Ornithology has announced that 2019’s Bird of the Year is the European turtle dove. The bird, which has a strong footprint in Czech culture, is currently on hard times with population numbers reduced by more than two thirds since the early 1980s.

A Communist Party bill aiming to tax church restitutions hit the rocks in the Senate on Wednesday where the vast majority of senators rejected it as “unconstitutional“. The bill was rejected not just by the opposition parties but by nine senators from the ruling ANO and Social Democratic Party which helped to push it through the lower house.

Twin sisters Jitka and Květa Válová, named “Dames of Czech Culture” in memorandum this week, were once described by a Communist zealot as an “ulcer on the red face of Kladno”, the industrial Bohemian city of their birth. They rejected the dominant Socialist Realism aesthetic of the 1950s, preferring more abstract and expressive work, long sealing their pariah status. They responded by turning their shared home and atelier into a salon for free thinkers.

After a break of nearly 50 years, the Czech Republic will be participating in the Milan Triennial, a prestigious international showcase for contemporary artists and designers. The Czech Republic will be represented by two works of art, Out of Power Tower by Krištof Kintera and Lithopy by Denisa Kera, which explore the theme of energy wastage and mocks the current craze for cryptocurrencies.