Current Affairs | All stories

The annual Auto-Stangl vintage car rally was held in Prague at the weekend. Since it began five years ago, this prestigious rally has become one of the biggest events of its kind in the world.

It has not been an easy week for the Health Minister Jozef Kubinyi. Last week he found himself at the center of an international controversy over the use of caged beds in Czech psychiatric hospitals. Then on Wednesday, his decision to put an immediate stop to the use of the beds provoked official criticism from president Vaclav Klaus. Yesterday however, Dr. Kubinyi was getting a very different kind of attention from a delegation of American medical students studying in the Czech Republic. Joshua Keating went along.

While in the previous decade the Czech Republic tended to be at the receiving end of foreign investment, the country has now started looking around for countries where it can place its own investments. Now the largest such deal in Czech history is in the pipeline as the Czech power utility CEZ has been promised a majority stake in a group of power distributing companies in Bulgaria.

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 complicated negotiations on forming a new coalition government have sparked fresh debate on the possibility of changing the country's electoral system from proportional representation to introduce more elements of a majority system, in order to ensure stronger and more stable governments in the Czech Republic.

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 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.