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Two years after a breakthrough verdict by the European Court for Human Rights which denounced racial segregation in Czech schools, Romany children still face widespread discrimination. That’s the conclusion of a group of Czech NGOs that say the Czech Education Ministry has shown good will but has introduced few practical measures to improve the situation.

Tuesday’s Constitutional Court decision came as quite a surprise to many people, not least constitutional lawyers, who questioned the court’s right to postpone elections. Earlier today, I spoke to Charles University’s Jan Kudrna – an expert on the Constitution and one of the most vociferous critics of the move – I asked him whether he thought the Constitutional Court had overstepped its mandate:

Sir Nicholas Winton has been referred to as the ‘British Schindler’. In 1939, as Europe was descending into war, he organised safe passage for hundreds of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. All in all, Winton saved the lives of 669 children, finding them homes in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, some of those he saved returned to Prague to take part in a train journey across Europe in his honour. I traveled with them on the first leg of the Winton Train’s journey:

It’s the first day of school, autumn is nearly upon us, and as you might have noticed there are changes too on the Radio Prague website. Radio Prague’s Editor-in-Chief Gerald Schubert came into the studio to explain what’s new and why.

The Slovak-owned low-cost carrier SkyEurope, the second largest airline at Prague Airport, has gone bankrupt. The airline has had problems over the past several months and on Monday night, it filed for bankruptcy. The collapse of SkyEurope has left thousands of Czechs stranded abroad, and many more with flights booked.

The Czech Republic’s footballers are currently preparing for their most important match in a long time – a clash with Slovakia on Saturday that they have to win to keep alive their hopes of reaching next year’s World Cup. Record goal scorer Jan Koller has come out of international retirement for the big game, while playmaker Tomáš Rosický is also back, though it’s not clear whether he’ll be fit. So what’s the mood like in the Czech camp ahead of what’s sure to be an intense match in Bratislava? That’s a question I put to goalkeeper Petr Čech.

Two topics are guaranteed to evoke an angry reaction from President Václav Klaus: environmental activists and Euro-federalists. On Friday he took both to task at the launch of his new book “Blue Planet Under Threat”.

The state of military and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan is a matter of perennial debate and concern for all countries involved; and as forces there revise their plan for the country, so too does the Czech Republic. There are currently some 500 Czech soldiers in Afghanistan serving in a variety of roles, and in rearranging their activities to suit the continuing crises there, one thing the Czech government is now focusing on is creating a more long-term plan for its missions. Andrej Čírtek of the Ministry of Defence has recently returned

Those who have never been to America get their image of the continent from TV, movies, books and other media. It seems that this much has not changed since the New World was discovered and the first news from the continent reached Europe. The National Gallery in Prague has launched an exhibition called “Amerika k sežrání”, or “Savouring America” which presents the New World through 16th to 19th century European prints.

Prague 2 district council is waging war on what it calls an ‘extreme situation’ on the capital’s Karlovo náměstí. Mayor Jana Černochová has said that steps must be taken against the increasing number of drug addicts, pickpockets and prostitutes found on the downtown Prague square.