Current Affairs | All stories

This weekend a painting by a famous French Fauvist painter Maurice de Vlaminck was sold at an auction in Prague’s Dorotheum for 5.3 million crowns (approximately 280,000 US dollars). Even though it was valued at 7 million crowns, in the end it only slightly exceeded the starting price. Vlaminck’s “Landscape with Buildings”, dating back to 1914, has thus become the 13th most expensive work of art to be sold at a Czech auction. The head of the auction house Marie Galova says it is not easy to explain the lack of interest on the part of buyers but

In just a few weeks the Czech Republic will lift its border controls as the country joins the Schengen area. However, that doesn’t mean Czechs will be allowed to cross the borders wherever they want to. Sumava National Park, stretching along the German and Austrian borders, has decided to exclude part of the German frontier from the border-free zone. Regional politicians and tourists are very much against the idea, arguing that the former Iron Curtain is now being transformed into a new “green curtain”. R.F. talked to Radovan Holub, the National

The consumption of marihuana in the Czech Republic along with other illicit substances has dropped, according to the annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction published on Thursday. Despite this, young Czech adults of up to 24 years of age consume more marihuana than their peers anywhere else in Europe.

Last academic year, more than 24,000 foreign students enrolled at Czech universities. More than 6,000 of them signed up for courses in the capital, at Prague’s Charles University. This record-breaking number of foreign students was made up mostly of Slovaks – in fact, two-thirds are from Slovakia. But some students came from slightly further afield as well… Tolulope Toyin-Oke is an undergraduate medic from Nigeria. She has been in the Czech capital for one year now, attending Charles University’s English-language medicine course. Over a coffee,

Many visitors to Prague praise the city’s public transport system, which is reliable, comprehensive and relatively easy to navigate. But buying tickets can sometimes be a problem, especially if you are far from the centre. Or rather it was a problem: on Thursday the Prague Transport Authority – Dopravni Podnik – launched a novel system under which passengers can buy single transfer tickets by mobile telephone text message. I talked to Jan Svoboda of the Prague Transport Authority and started by asking what were the reasons behind the introduction

Every other diplomat representing the Russian Federation at its Prague embassy and several consulates across the Czech Republic works for Russian intelligence services, according to the 2006 annual report by Czech counter-intelligence. The report, published on Wednesday, also highlights other security risks including an increasing influence by organized crime in the state sector.

The Czech Republic’s campaign to reach football’s Euro 2008 came to a successful end on Wednesday evening with a 2:0 away win over Cyprus. What’s more, the Czechs – at times somewhat at sea earlier in the year – finished first in their group, ahead of Germany.

This month, the first lesbian publishing house opened in the Czech Republic. LePress has a portfolio of two titles so far, both translations from American originals. The aim of the publishers is to introduce Czech lesbians to the sort of lesbian fiction that is being written overseas. The woman behind the project is Marketa Navratilova. She told Radio Prague where the idea came from:

When the famous Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote about the Nymburk brewery in his novel “Cutting It Short”, he probably didn’t expect that one day its beer would make it as far as the Caribbean. Now, beer from Nymburk is also heading for another market. One of its products, which recently received a kosher certificate, will now be sold in Israel.

New proposals put forward by the European Commission aimed at reforming the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) have met with opposition by Czech representatives, including the country’s Agrarian Chamber and the Agriculture Ministry. The EU is trying to slash millions in annual subsidies which would leave the largest agrarian businesses hardest hit. Under the proposals, large farms in the EU - including the Czech Republic – could lose up to 45 percent of previous funds.