News

The state prosecutor in the trial of a gang accused of being behind the contamination of alcohol which resulted in the deaths of more than 50 people has called for life sentences for two of the main defendants. Prosecutor Roman Kafka said in his summing up before a court in the eastern city of Zlín that the crimes of Tomáš Krepela and Rudolf Fian were exceptional and they deserved exceptional punishments. He called for the man accused of being the main distributor of the methanol tainted spirits, Jiří Vacula, to be sentenced to 20 years. A final verdict for the six accused is expected on May 21 or 22. The methanol scandal exploded in September 2012 with the death toll rapidly mounting, especially in the Zlín region.

The 69th Prague Spring international music festival starts in the Czech capital on Monday with a performance of Bedřich Smetana’s My Country by the Czech Philharmonic. The festival offers over 50 concerts by symphony orchestras and other ensembles including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The Prague Spring festival this year focuses on Czech music, and commemorates the 100th anniversary of birth of conductor Rafael Kubelík, one of the festival’s co-founders. The even runs until June 3.

Hundreds of Vietnamese people from across the Czech Republic staged a protest on Sunday in front of China’s embassy in Prague. With banners that read “Stop China”, “Get Out of Vietnam”, and others, they protested against what they see as China’s intrusion into allegedly Vietnamese territorial waters in the South China Sea. In recent weeks, Vietnam’s government has complained of incidents in which Chinese vessels deliberately rammed Vietnamese ships in an attempt to gain control of parts of the area. The organizers of Prague’s protest told the news agency ČTK that despite living far from Vietnam, they had a duty to defend their home country. There are an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese people living in the Czech Republic, many of them Czech citizens.

A monument to the late Czech writer Josef Škvorecký was unveiled in his native town of Náchod, eastern Bohemia, on Sunday. The monument is in the form of a bench with a realistic statue of the writer. Josef Škoverecký, who was born in Náchod in 1924, came to prominence in the 1950s with the novel Cowards which depicted the end of WWII in his town through the eyes of a teenager. He left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968 and settled in Canada where he and his wife launched Sixty-Eight Publishers which published books by authors banned in Czechoslovakia. Josef Škvorecký died in 2012.