Current Affairs | All stories

Lacrosse is a game traditionally played in North America but since the late eighties Czechs have really taken to it as well. And not only have they taken to it, these days it seems they are leading they way!

The Czech Republic as a country with its own bitter experience of communist rule often enlists in events promoting democracy in totalitarian countries. The latest initiative has been aimed to encourage the transformation of society in Iraq. This initiative lay not only in financial investment but also in cooperation with non-governmental organizations and local partners. The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs has now established a new department called the "Section for Transformation Promotion", which will build on this experience and evolve similar

To brighten up a cold cloudy Prague this week, the Teatro Toc Puppet Theatre has taken to the streets. The local company is presenting an International Street Puppet Theatre Festival that has a dynamic cast of artists from all around the world. The performances this week are the final stretch of a twenty day workshop during which participants have designed and carved wooden marionettes, and then rehearsed a condensed version of Romeo and Juliet, performing it over six days. The director Marek Becka chose the classic tale as a story familiar to

Czech pop-music fans were shocked by the sad news on Wednesday that Czech rock-and-roll legend, Karel Zich, had died in a tragic accident in France on Tuesday. His expansive repertoire attracted many followers during the forty years of a career that was prematurely ended this week. He was only 55.

The leaders of the three parties trying to put together a new government after Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla's resignation last month, met once again on Tuesday, and the outlines of a new government came a step closer. But Mr Spidla's successor at the helm of the Social Democrats, Stanislav Gross, is having to tread a very delicate path, not only with his coalition partners, but also among dissenters within his own party. David Vaughan has been following developments.

The Czech Foreign Minister, Cyril Svoboda, is in the United States, and one of his most ambitious missions has been to persuade the USA to waive visa requirements for Czech citizens. Of the new EU members only Slovenia meets the criteria set by the US authorities. The number of Czech illegal workers in the States is still above the threshold set in the so-called "visa waiver programme"; its estimated that tens of thousands of Czechs have entered the United States on tourist visas and now live and work there illegally.

The most famous Czech boys' choir Boni Pueri is at the moment rehearsing with no less than seventeen other boys' choirs in the Czech town of Hradec Kralove. The final performance is going to take place in Prague's famous Dvorak Hall this Thursday, the climax of the week-long World Festival of Singing for Boys and Men.

For years advocates for the rights of the mentally ill and disabled have been campaigning for Czech hospitals and other institutions to prohibit the use of so-called "caged beds" to restrain patients. This week, the author of the Harry Potter children's books, J.K. Rowling, very publicly lent her voice to the campaign; on Tuesday, the Czech Health Minister ordered psychiatric institutions to immediately stop using the caged beds. Brian Kenety spoke with the director of Prague's Centre for Mental Health Care Development, psychiatrist Dr Jan Pfeiffer,

This summer Prague is hosting its 8th Shakespeare Festival. It was initially the idea of the former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who is, of course, no stranger to the theatre himself. This year we can see open-air productions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the Prague, Brno and Bratislava castles. There will also be an English-language puppet production of Hamlet. Laura Teodorescu went to see one of the productions:

The Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic was in the Czech Republic on Monday for his first official foreign trip since his election in April. Mr Gasparovic started by meeting his Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus, continuing a tradition of each country's president making his first official visit to the other, established after the so-called "velvet divorce", when Czechoslovakia peacefully split in 1993.