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President Miloš Zeman’s list of invitees for official state visits has caused a stir among Czech human rights advocates. The list includes Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, set to arrive in April, as well as Turkmenistan and Uzbek leaders. The president’s office says two of these trips are return visits planned months in advance. But some observers voice concerns over a shift in Czech foreign policy. I discussed the issue with Oldřich Bureš, a professor of international relations at Prague’s Metropolitan University.

Vanilla attropogon – loosely translated as “vanilla with a dark beard” is not something you are likely to put in your pudding. Out of the vast number of vanilla orchid species only three are commercially cultivated for consumption, the most common of which is the Mexican vanilla, now cultivated in Madagaskar. Other breeds are used in the perfume industry but most of the species are simply flowers growing in the tropics. Now Czech botanists have uncovered a brand new species in a largely unexplored nature reserve in southern Vietnam.

Major foreign investments in the Czech Republic have been thin on the ground in recent years. So Czech politicians now appear to be falling over themselves to make sure that Internet commerce giant Amazon pushes ahead with its plans on the outskirts of Prague and Brno.

The European Commission released its first ever corruption report on Monday and the news was not good. EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom described the level of corruption in the EU as “breath-taking” and the report indicates that the Czech Republic makes a significant contribution to this unhappy state of affairs. Among the statistics presented: 95 percent of Czechs perceive corruption as widespread and 71 percent of companies consider it to be the main hurdle to doing business in this country. I asked Radim Bureš of the Czech branch

More than half a million Czechs are currently out of work, and the prospects are particularly bleak for people in their 50s who are too young to retire, but by all accounts too old to be of interest to potential employers. People who find themselves out of a job in this age group have only a 50 percent chance of getting employed and the threat of never finding work again is very real. This is something that the NGO Alternativa 50+ is trying to change.

The former governing Civic Democrats lost one of their most popular public faces on Thursday when Jiří Pospíšil, the former justice minister, announced he was leaving the party. Mr Pospíšil said there’d been a mutual loss of confidence in the new party leadership and some of his colleagues, but observers are divided as to whether this will do any more damage to the once mighty centre-right party.

A large part of the Czech squad for the Winter Olympics in Sochi departed from Prague today. But local Olympics bosses are embroiled at home in political and ongoing human rights disputes.

The appointment of a new center-left coalition government to office on Wednesday has ended a six- month power vacuum during which the country was ruled by an interim administration handpicked by the president. Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka’s three party coalition has promised to boost economic growth, streamline state administration, raise pensions and bring the country back to the EU mainstream. But commentators are already predicting hard times ahead for an alliance of parties as politically diverse as the Social Democrats, ANO and the Christian

A new Czech coalition government has assumed office after being sworn in by President Miloš Zeman at Prague Castle on Wednesday. The centre-left cabinet, formed by the Social Democrats, ANO and the Christian Democrats, comes to power 95 days after the general election, promising to ease austerity, boost economic growth, and return the country to the EU mainstream.

Figures released by the website Netmonitor show that local search engine Seznam.cz continues to be the most visited site on the Czech internet. In fact, last year the site – which was set up in 1996 – had over six million users. But how has Seznam.cz managed to stay ahead of the powerful Google, which has long been the top search site in many countries? That’s a question I put to technology journalist Petr Kočí.