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In Magazine: speed dating in Prague’s metro, a Czech teen ostensibly drinking a pint of beer through her ear has become a hit on YouTube, an Ostrava ensemble gives an opera performance in a paternoster and Prague Zoo is offering to cure your animal phobia!

Maintenance work has started on the main runway at Prague’s Vaclav Havel Airport. From mid-May until the end of September the airport will have to rely on alternate runways. This is the second stage of a three phase-reconstruction due to end in 2014. The airport says it has carefully planned the use of the alternate runaways in order to protect people living in the vicinity of the airport from excessive noise pollution as much as possible. The matter is also being consulted with experts on noise pollution.

My guest today is Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia. Born in 1927 in the Czech town of Liberec, Marketa left Czechoslovakia following the communist putsch in 1948. She established herself in Canada as a professor of comparative literature, author and essayist, focusing in particular on publishing samizdat literature, and also writing about the work of Czech playwrights such as Pavel Kohout, Josef Topol, Ivan Klíma, and her friend the former president Václav Havel.

Czech Post on Wednesday began distribution new stamps with the portrait of President Miloš Zeman. The president’s portrait on the stamp was based on a photograph by Herbert Slavík. Czech Post has so far produced 10 million pieces of the new stamp which is worth 10 crowns. Previously, it had produced 94 million presidential stamps with the portrait of Václav Klaus, and 260 million with Václav Havel's image.

An agreement has been signed in Prague on the creation of a new Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Jointly created by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, the Václav Havel Library and the Charter 77 Foundation, the award will be presented every October to a group or individual that has been strongly engaged in the defence of human rights. Václav Havel, who died in 2011, led Czechoslovakia’s peaceful Velvet Revolution and was an active defender of freedoms in many parts of the world.

The Václav Havel award for human rights has been established in Prague in memory of the late Czech president, dissident playwright and human rights advocate. The prize, which will reward activities in defence of human rights around the world, will be first handed out this autumn by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe along with the Václav Havel Library and the Charta 77 Foundation.

Representatives of the Václav Havel Library and the Charter 77 Foundation, together with the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, have reached an agreement on establishing an international award that will bear Mr Havel's name. The award is to recognize outstanding contributions to human rights and will be given annually, in October. The agreement is to be signed by Jean-Claude Mignon, the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Marta Smolíková of the Václav Havel Library and František Janouch, representing the Charter 77 Foundation.

Petr Hájek, former vice chancellor to the president, will launch a new internet journal with the slogan of “counterrevolutionary magazine” linked to Parlamentnílisty.cz, the news site reports. Mr Hájek served at Prague Castle under former president Václav Klaus. Hájek, a controversial figure at Prague Castle for years, called the late Václav Havel a “servant of Satan” in a book published last year and in the past questioned, conspiracy-style, the truth of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting they could have been orchestrated by the US secret service.

The Czech branch of the PEN club has issued an open letter calling on the Czech President Václav Klaus to refrain from attacking his predecessor Václav Havel. President Klaus, whose second and last term in office will end in less than a month, has made a number of public statements recently that expressed disrespect for the former president, playwright and lauded dissident. In an interview for a Polish newspaper, the current president referred to the late Mr Havel as a leftist extremist.

The Czech president, Václav Klaus, has slammed his predecessor, the late Václav Havel, in an interview for a Polish weekly, the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny reported on Monday. Mr. Klaus told Do Rzeczy he regarded Mr. Havel as an extreme leftist who had wanted to create an elitist post-democracy rather than a democracy, adding that his “Havelism” was a revived form of Jacobinism. The Czech president said that while he had believed in the state, his predecessor had been a cosmopolitan with a foreign policy of “interventionism (and humanitarian bombing)” rather than respect for any world states. This last point was an evident reference to Mr. Havel’s support for the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999. With marked ideological differences, Mr. Klaus and Mr. Havel had frequent run-ins in the two decades prior to the former dissident’s death in 2011.