News

Social Democrats who are part of the ruling coalition at City Hill have taken issue with plans next year for a new hymn or anthem celebrating the 700th anniversary of the birth of Charles IV, the Czech News Agency reported. Party members slammed the idea it might be written by Czech performer Daniel Landa, once a member of the skinhead band Orlík. City councillor Jan Wolf, representing the Christian Democrats/Three Party coalition, tried to clarify, saying that Mr Landa had only suggested the idea of an anthem, not that he had to write it. According to the city councilor, a jury will select a successful candidate from a broader list for the commission. Daniel Landa has sold 1.2 million records in the Czech Republic and has written several musicals, some of them drawing heavily on medieval settings and themes.

The head of the International Ice Hockey Federation Rene Fasel has expressed deep disappointment that members of the Russian hockey team left the ice at Prague’s O2 arena on Sunday showing what he called complete disrespect for Canadian competitors who won the final 6:1. After the blowout, most of the team made a show of leaving the ice without waiting for the Canadian national anthem. Mr Fasel told TASS he had seen nothing like it in more than 29 years he has attended to the championship. Some players - Alexander Ovechkin, Yevgeny Malkin, Viktor Tikhonov and Dmitry Kulikov – reportedly remained on the ice, but Mr Fasel charged that Russia’s head coach and general manager should have been present to stop the others. He added that after he returned from the Czech Republic, the IIHF would review the incident.

Wiretaps played in court have revealed that the former aide and now wife to ex-prime minister Petr Nečas, Jana Nagyová, called him a primitive and other names, the Czech News Agency reports. In phone calls to a friend, she also referred to Mr Nečas' then wife, Radka, as “a cow” and a “hysterical woman”, criticising her for burdening the then prime minister with family problems. Jana Nagyová had an affair with Mr Nečas when she was still his chief-of-staff; they married after his divorce. She is alleged to have ordered military surveillance of his first wife in order to find compromising material, amounting to abuse of office. The scandal surrounding the former aide helped bring down the former centre-right government.

The country’s foreign minister, Lubomír Zaorálek, in a meeting with EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos, has said that the acceptance of refugees is a decision that needs to be left up to individual EU member states. The minister was expressing opposition to a proposal by the European Commission from last week that mandatory quotas on refugees be introduced across the EU. The European Union is trying to agree on a comprehensive plan to tackle the problem of human trafficking as well as illegal migration, to also try and prevent further tragedy in the Mediterranean, where hundreds of migrants have drowned trying to reach Europe. Mr Zaorálek said that the acceptance of refugees was a decision which needed to be fully up to members in order for the state to accept full responsibility. The minister called the quota proposal an entirely new approach - to some degree, he said, "revolutionary".