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The Czech Republic has had a poor reputation for relegating Roma children and children with disabilities to special schools for years. However, a recent survey carried out by People in Need and Palacký University in Olomouc suggests that the situation might be gradually improving. According to the outcomes of the survey, Czech teachers are increasingly more willing to include children with various handicaps in regular classrooms. But in order to do so, they need more finances as well as more guidance from the ministry.

Czech President Miloš Zeman will next week make his second visit to China in less than a year. He is the only European Union leader travelling to Beijing for commemorations of the end of WWII – and will even attend a huge military parade. For his part, Mr. Zeman highlights China’s growing economic importance and promises new business for Czech companies.

Prague’s mayor Adriana Krnáčová appears to have clung onto power for the moment after a tumultuous week or two in politics at Prague city hall. Key parties within the ruling coalition have fallen out and top members of the mayor’s own party, ANO, passed a motion of no support for her. The dramatic events have reflected pretty poorly on the ANO party nationally.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka has called for the EU to take join action in protecting the alliance’s outer borders. Following talks with the visiting French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, Mr. Sobotka stressed the urgency of a coordinated effort to stem the growing flow of refugees, saying that failure to do so could see individual countries reinforcing their own borders and undermining the basic concept of Schengen.

Charles University in Prague has decided to open up to migrants who are seeking asylum in the Czech Republic. Four of the university’s faculties have offered to provide free tuition and accommodation to refugees who have been granted asylum and residence permits in the country and who have passed the entrance exam. I spoke to Jan Konvalinka, Vice rector of research at Charles University, and I first asked him about the reasons behind the project:

While Czech politics is often in flux, the ministries that the political parties fight to win control over show a surprising consistency. There have been few newcomer ministries over the last decades. Now, however, the deputy prime minister in charge of science, research and innovation, Pavel Bělobrádek, is pushing for the creation of a new research and development ministry which will better be able to fulfill the government’s targets for more dynamic and effective research and innovation.

This Friday marks the 47th anniversary of invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led troops in 1968, which crushed the short-lived Prague Spring reform movement and brought in political and moral decline which lasted until the late 1980’s. On Friday, the event was commemorated at a traditional ceremony in front of the Czech Radio building, which bore witness to one of the most brutal clashes between civilian protesters and the occupying forces.

A significant retrospective of the work of the great Czech photographer Jan Lukas has just opened at Prague’s Art in Box gallery in connection with the centenary of his birth. Entitled People (1930–1995), it includes images ranging from the funerals of Masaryk and Beneš to prominent Czech émigrés in New York, where Lukas spent the last four decades of his life. I spoke to his daughter Helena Lukas and began by asking how hard it had been to whittle his large archive down to the hundred or so photographs on display.

After several lean years Czech arms exporters are once again doing good business. According to the Defense and Security Industry Association 2014 brought a 47 percent increase in arms exports. Czech firms found buyers around the world, selling arms to the tune of 11.5 billion crowns. Exports to countries in North Africa and the Middle East saw a 100 percent increase that year. I asked Dušan Švarc of the Defense and Security Industry Association to comment on the significance of this increase for the arms industry.

There are seven potential sites in the Czech Republic which could one day house a deep geological repository for the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel. Recently, elected officials from local municipalities had a chance to visit just such an installation – which will be the first in the world – under construction in Finland. It is thought the Finnish repository could serve as a model for the Czech Republic’s own.