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Headlines around the world have been made by a small Pacific island state’s challenge to plans for a large Czech coal-fired power plant. But Czech environmental groups are also opposing the plant on the grounds that local people will continue to suffer from harmful pollution far into the future.

On Thursday the Czech Republic lost one of its oldest culinary personalities, heir to the First-Republic delicatessen that bares his name: Jan Paukert. Credited with the “invention” of one of the staples of the traditional Czech menu, the chlebíček, a kind of open sandwich on one piece of bread, Mr Paukert’s family delicatessen was also a hub for high-society in the 1920s and ‘30s.

A study by a Charles University research team suggests that over three quarters of Czech university students have at some point been the victims of sexual harassment. Unlike most academic institutions in Western Europe and the United States, Czech universities do not have explicitly stated anti-sexual harassment policies, and the issue is largely neglected. The research team is now sending guidelines to universities across the Czech Republic on how to combat the problem. Sarah Borufka spoke to one of the authors of the report, Professor Petr

The Czech government is currently deciding whether to introduce full body scanners at the country’s airports, a move backed by the interior minister. But not everybody is in favour of the security measure. The head of the Czech nuclear safety authority says the risks from the radiation used by the scanners could be too high, and is calling for an alternative approach.

The magnitude-seven earthquake that struck the Caribbean state of Haiti on Tuesday is threatening to become one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory, with death tolls estimated between tens and hundreds of thousands. Thousands of more people remain buried in the rubble. There is little water and a tragic scarcity of other resources that survivors need; understandably most are under extreme emotional and physical strain. As the gravity of the situation has grown clear, Czech charity organisations and the state have begun organising their

Thousands of tonnes of salt have been spread on roads in the Czech Republic and the rest of Europe during recent heavy snowfall. So much so, that stocks threaten to run out. Heavy use has sparked warnings from environmentalists about the damage to plants and animals.

A Czech language version of Facebook only became available a year ago. The social platform allows users to design a profile, add friends, or share personal news. In the Czech Republic, the site is very popular and user numbers have been growing exponentially.

The world’s most powerful military alliance, NATO, is in the middle of a far reaching and overdue rethink of its strategy. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is leading a group tasked with pointing the way. She and other members of the group were in the Czech capital Prague on Tuesday to collect input and give some pointers where the process is heading.

Medical statistics indicate that the Czech Republic’s Plzeň region, in western Bohemia, has the highest rate of colon and kidney cancer in the world. A new research center funded by the European Union will now devote itself to the study of this worrying phenomenon. While environmental factors are sure to play a role, the exact cause of the high cancer rate in the region remains a mystery.

Romany children in the Czech Republic still face unequal access to education, says Amnesty International in a report which has just been released. Two years after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that placing Romany children in “special schools” was unlawful discrimination, Amnesty International went back to Ostrava where the court case was originally filed to see what had changed. While the Czech government has taken certain anti-discriminatory measures, the practice remains more or less the same, says Fotis Filippou, one of the authors