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Last week the European Commission confirmed the world’s most powerful laser known as ELI (which stands for Light Infrastructure) will be developed in the town of Dolní Břežany, near Prague. At the cost of 6.7 billion crowns, the laser could spur breakthroughs in everything from nuclear physics to medical diagnosis, treatment and therapy.

Before the computer age, Prague city planners used a large 3D model of the capital to see what new buildings, roads and other features would look like in the given environment. But 10 years ago, the model was replaced by digital technologies; now it has been put to a new use. With new interactive features, the model has gone on display in one of the city’s shopping malls.

This Tuesday marks 25 years since the shock of the Chernobyl disaster, when Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded, sending previously unseen quantities of nuclear contamination into the air. A radiation cloud spread over Russia and Central and Western Europe, with the first reading of the disaster registered more than 1,000 kilometres away in Sweden. To date Chernobyl is still considered the world’s worst nuclear accident, leaving whole villages and cities in the area abandoned. What is less known is that in the early

With just a few days before the start of the hockey world championships in Slovakia, the Czech national team has shown good form. The Czechs beat Finland and Russia at the Czech Hockey Games held in Brno over the weekend, and although they lost their last game to Sweden, the team’s promising performance raises hopes the team will be able to defend last year’s world title.

The Czech Republic’s major right-of-centre party, the Civic Democrats, celebrated 20 years since its foundation. At a convention held in Prague on Thursday to mark the occasion, all three chairmen in the party’s history – Václav Klaus, Mirek Topolánek and Petr Nečas – offered their views of the party’s past achievements and future challenges. But the celebrations could not conceal the deep internal conflicts the party will have to resolve a massive wane in voter support.

President Vaclav Klaus on Thursday appointed Jan Kubice the country’s new interior minister. The former head of a police squad for fighting organized crime comes with the reputation of a zealous civil servant who was not afraid to pick a fight with politicians. He became a household name in 2006 when he leaked a report to the press in which he claimed that organized crime had infiltrated state administration. Who is the new Czech interior minister and why has his appointment infuriated the opposition?

The Environment Minister Tomáš Chalupa has changed plans by the head of Šumava National Park on how to battle the bark beetle, issuing a decision on Thursday that will still allow the manual felling of trees in the park’s most environmentally-sensitive and protected areas but will ban the use of heavy machinery or chemicals. Proposed intervention to fight devastation by the bark beetle in the national park had been at the forefront of a highly public battle between the park’s director, Jan Stráský, and former colleagues, scientists and specialists

President Václav Klaus has welcomed the coalition agreement reached by the country’s three centre-right parties on Monday night in an effort to save the country’s pro-reform government. Speaking to journalists in the northern city of Liberec on Tuesday the president said he was ready to accept the proposed Cabinet changes and indicated that he himself had exerted no small effort in helping to break the deadlock. However the cosmetic government reshuffle has raised plenty of criticism and many commentators are skeptical regarding the coalition’s

The Czech Republic has become the eighth EU member state to approve the use of a cannabis-based medicine, the British-made Sativex. Czechs also rank among Europe’s top marihuana consumers, and possession of the illicit substance for personal use has been decriminalized. But the country is one of few members of the European Union that still ban the cultivation of hemp for medical purposes.

The Czech Republic’s fragile economic recovery has, among other things, affected Czechs’ beer drinking habits. After an 8-percent drop in beer production last year, data by the Czech Beer and Malt Association released on Tuesday now show that in 2009, imports of low-quality, cheap beers reached a record level of around one million hectolitres, three times more than the previous year. RP spoke to the association’s head, Jan Veselý about the changing beer market in the country.