Current Affairs | All stories

Hundreds of thousands of people in the Czech Republic have been bombarded in recent weeks by fraudulent e-mails in what is the biggest attempted internet fraud scam in the country’s history. The emails purport to be from country’s biggest bank, Česká Spořitelna – and ask for client’s account and credit card details. The campaign has been so unrelenting that many Czechs have learned a new word, phishing the name given to this form of scam. I talked to Česká Spořitelna’s spokeswoman Klára Gajdušková and started by asking whether the bank has had

It has only been five months since Ottawa dropped visa requirements for Czechs, but since then Canada has seen a marked jump in asylum applications by Romanies from the Czech Republic. On Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported that more than 100 claims had been put forward since November and there is now concern a rise in applications could cross a key threshold in 2008. Under such circumstances, Canada might reassess its visa policy and reintroduce travel restrictions for Czechs.

The Czech artist Jaroslav Šerých is a man of many talents: painter, illustrator, printmaker and sculptor. To mark the great artist's 80th birthday, a retrospective of Šerých's work recently opened at Prague's Museum of Fine Arts. I went along to see the exhibition and meet the organiser.

Lukáš Bauer, the Czech Republic's newest sporting hero, arrived in Prague on Tuesday, proudly in possession of the Crystal Globe for winning cross country skiing's season-long World Cup. Bauer, who is 30, is the first Czech ever to win the prestigious trophy. He actually had the World Cup in the bag two weeks ago, but had to wait for the last race of the season to get his hands on the Crystal Globe. I spoke to Lukas Bauer about the reaction to his success here in the Czech Republic.

The Czech Parliament on Wednesday opened debate on the Lisbon Treaty signed in December of 2007 by the EU’s 27 member states. The treaty replaces the controversial EU Constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, and is expected to fundamentally alter the way the EU is run. Although Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek officially signed the document in Portugal last year, it is no secret that his Civic Democratic Party is far from happy with it. I asked political analyst Petr Just whether he anticipated problems in the course of its

News has emerged that the former Czech prime minister Stanislav Gross has failed his bar exam. For Gross, this latest story is just one of a series of negative reports that have appeared about the former PM ever since he hit the spotlight as the country’s youngest ever prime minister.

Free plane tickets around the Czech Republic, generous travel allowances, low- rent luxury flats in Prague– those are just a few of the many perks enjoyed by Czech deputies and senators. This week, the Prague Transport Authority decided to strip lawmakers of one of these privileges and make them pay for the use of public transport like everyone else, warning that any lawmaker caught without a ticket would be fined.

The first Czech soldier has died in action in what the United States calls the war on terror. He was the victim of a suicide bomber in southern Afghanistan on Monday; two other Czech soldiers were injured, one of them seriously.

Many capital cities are famed for their café culture, and Prague is no exception. At the turn of the twentieth century, writers like Karel Čapek and Franz Kafka would meet with artists, academics and politicians in the Czech capital’s cafes to expound their ideas over a cup of coffee - and maybe the smallest snifter of absinthe. Now a new exhibition called ‘Prague’s Coffeehouses and their World’ takes a look at the golden age of the city’s cafes, and attempts to recreate some of the magic such coffeehouses were said to have had at the turn of the

Stock markets around the world recorded heavy losses on Monday in reaction to the emergency bailout of US investment bank Bear Stearns. The Prague Stock Exchange was no exception, with the headline PX index dropping by almost 2.5 percent. Analysts said investors were responding to the unexpected collapse of the leading U.S. investment bank and the problems of the U.S. financial market in general. The Prague exchange saw something of a recovery on Tuesday, but the markets are still jittery. Jiří Staník is a senior analyst at the Prague-based investment