Current Affairs | All stories

You’ve just had a tough day at work, your family is making more and more demands, you’re smoking and drinking too much and if you’re not careful you could wind up dead. Sound dire? Well certainly – but only in real life. Here, we’re talking about your character in a new Czech game; one where players compete to change their lifestyles or else.

This week marks the 35-year-anniversary of the founding of Charter 77, an informal civic initiative against the communist regime. Many of its signatories would later become important figures in post-communist Czech society, such as philosopher and playwright Václav Havel, who was elected the country’s first president after the revolution. Now, the anniversary of the charter is being honored in Prague with a week-long commemoration, the Week of Charter 77.

For the majority of younger people today, life without social media is unimaginable. Posting pictures and videos, sharing the latest news and keeping on top of events –many aspects of daily life take place on sites like Facebook or Twitter. But do senior citizens use this new technology, and if so, for what? We went along to a social media course at Prague’s Elpida center for the elderly.

Two Czech ministers have clashed over how the government should support the country’s exports. Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, whose office has put a lot of effort into promoting Czech businesses abroad, dismissed a new export strategy designed by the Industry and Trade Ministry. In spite of the squabbles, however, the government’s support for exporters is bearing fruit: Czech exports have reached record levels and are a major driving force behind the Czech economic recovery.

Voters in neighbouring Slovakia made a powerful statement at the weekend when they handed an overwhelming victory to the centre-left party SMER, which now has a strong enough mandate to form a single-party government. What that statement means though has been interpreted variously in the Czech Republic, where the current centre-right government has reached record lows in popularity. In the view of Foreign Minister and chairman of the TOP 09 Party Karel Schwarzenberg, the poll should be a lesson for the Czech government that corruption doesn’t pay,

The first round of the trial of leading Public Affairs member and former transport minister Vít Bárta comes to a close on Friday. Over the course of the week no less than six past and present government ministers have taken the stand to give testimony in the biggest corruption case in recent memory, which will be adjourned on Friday while the court goes over the evidence.

The Polish media have dubbed it “saltgate” – revelations that at least three Polish companies have been selling industrial salt (normally used to de-ice roads) to milk, fish, meat and bread producers. Several countries to which Poland may have exported potentially contaminated food products have been identified: Lithuania, Ireland, England, Germany and the Czech Republic. This week, the Czech Agriculture Ministry decided to temporarily block the import of salt from Poland, while tests are carried out by the State Veterinary Administration to determine

As part of this year’s edition of the One World International Human Rights Film Festival, which is currently on in Prague, the German-produced independent documentary Radioactivists – Protest in Japan provides a rare and up-close look at Japanese protests in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is being shown in the Youth Quake category, which features films that portray young people’s struggle for change in countries around the world. I asked co-director Clarissa Seidel, who made the film together with her good friend Julia Leser, about

The One World International Human Rights Film Festival has just started in Prague. This year’s edition brings over a hundred films from 72 countries to the Czech capital, where documentary lovers can visit special festival screenings until March 15. With such an abundance of interesting documentaries, it’s something difficult to determine what to see first – we asked program director Kateřina Bartošová about her highlights and about the theme of this year’s main category.

A new study commissioned by the Interior Ministry has suggested that the neo-Nazi movement in the Czech Republic (estimated as 4,000 strong with 400 hardcore members) is successfully pushing an agenda of hatred and racism in troubled parts of the country. As it stands, the last decade or so saw a number of arson attacks against ethnic Roma families including a highly-publicised case where a toddler barely survived and was left with lifelong disabilities. According to the latest report, unless more comprehensive measures are taken soon, racially-motivated