Current Affairs | All stories

If you’d stopped a Czech citizen on the street twenty years ago and told him he was free to live and work in Austria or Germany, he would have looked at you in amazement. But on May 1st, that’s exactly what happened - the two countries lifted their final restrictions on Czech workers - and what’s truly amazing is that it’s happened with an almost total absence of fanfare, or even coverage in the media. Equally amazing, perhaps, is that hardly any Czechs will take advantage of it.

The city of Brno, in the south-east of the country, is bracing itself for Sunday’s extremist march through one of the city’s Romany neighbourhoods. A local court had overturned a ban on the march issued by Brno City Hall. Now, police are getting ready to deploy hundreds of officers to oversee the march, while several local groups are planning to try and block part of its route.

Millions around the world are watching with bated breath as preparations conclude for the United Kingdom’s royal wedding on Friday. Interest in the Czech Republic is of course rather marginal, but Prague’s English community is looking forward to celebrating the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton from afar. We found out some of the events set to take place in the Czech capital.

The Czech Constitutional Court has abolished another part of the government’s austerity package. The court on Wednesday ruled invalid the taxation of state support for housing-related saving plans, arguing it was approved in breach of the constitution. This is the second time the court thwarted the government’s plans to bring down this year’s budget deficit. Wednesday’s verdict made President Václav Klaus lash out against the court, accusing it of interfering with politics.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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