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The leader of the Communist Party, Vojtech Filip, has called on his party colleagues to modernise. Mr Filip says the party needs new voters and should find the courage to address different and even controversial issues. While the party also gets votes from non-Communist citizens who have cast their ballots as a form of protest, Mr Filip would like those votes to become more sincere through a change in the party programme. The first step towards modernisation should be taken at the party's next congress, he suggests.

Fire fighters spent most of Saturday night removing sulphuric acid off a road in the Prague 10 district. The dangerous chemical leaked out of a truck that was transporting the substance. The 1000 litres were spilled over a 3 kilometre stretch. No-one was in danger as the road runs through an uninhabited area. The company for which the chemical was being transported is reportedly the same one that was responsible for a similar accident in another part of the same district on Thursday.

Hundreds of people have marked the fifty-ninth anniversary of the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia by gathering on Prague's Old Town Square to commemorate the victims of Communism. Speaking on the same balcony of the Kinsky Palace from where Communist leader Klement Gottwald gave his first address to the nation after taking power 59 years ago, the president of the Confederation of Political Prisoners, Nadezda Kavalirova, asked Czechs to call for a ban of the Communist Party. The Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia on February 25 1948, starting forty years of totalitarian rule.

Dozens of people, including Senate chairman Premysl Sobotka, also gathered on Sunday in Prague's Mala Strana district to commemorate a student march to Prague Castle, which took place on the same day as the communist putsch in 1948. The march was crushed by the police as it was in protest at Communist rule and in support of the then president Edvard Benes. Its participants were later persecuted by the regime.

Over one hundred people attended an extreme right concert in the south Bohemian town of Ceske Budejovice on Saturday night. The four-hour event was monitored by around fifty police officers. Of the 120 participants, most of them are believed to belong to the neo-Nazi movement. Four bands performed at the concert - two of them were from the Czech Republic, one was from neighbouring Slovakia, and the fourth from Canada.