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The UN Human Rights’ Committee has asked the Czech government to close down a pig farm located on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp for Romanies. Built in the 1970s, the farm has been a source of embarrassment to all post-1989 governments, but despite bringing the country international disgrace, it is still there and likely to remain so.

Friday marks the 30th anniversary of the day Czechoslovak athlete Jarmila Kratochvílová broke the world record in the women’s 800 metres. Remarkably, the time Kratochvílová set in Munich in 1983 has never been bettered, becoming one of the longest standing records in world athletics.

It currently looks unlikely that Czech MPs will approve the Rusnok cabinet in a vote in the lower house in two weeks’ time. President Miloš Zeman has hinted that if it fails, he could give the former centre-right coalition a chance to form the next cabinet. But the president has laid down a condition: before he even considers that, he wants to see notarized signatures of a majority of MPs pledging to back such a cabinet. I asked commentator Erik Best for his reading of Mr Zeman’s latest move.

A new demographic projection released on Tuesday makes for bracing reading. It suggests that the population of the Czech Republic will fall from today’s 10.5 million to in the region of 7.7 million by the year 2100. As the percentage of elderly people shoots up, the birth rate is set to fall markedly – a problem that demographers say cannot be solved by an influx of foreigners.

Changes of government in the Czech Republic are generally accompanied by a shake-up in the country’s civil service. Although the Rusnok caretaker government has not yet won a vote of confidence in the lower house, a change-of-guard in the top and middle ranks of civil service administration has already been launched. So how politicized is the country’s civil service and how is that affecting the running of the state? A question I put to political analyst Jiří Pehe.

The Czech authorities have seized 100 million crowns worth of rhino horns, the largest amount ever confiscated in the country. In total, 24 horns were confiscated which were to be sold in Asia. In the operation, the police also arrested members of an international gang which hired Czech nationals to hunt for the trophies in South Africa.

Terrorist attacks in public spaces have been haunting city dwellers for years. The recent bombing attack at the Boston marathon made those fears even more acute. Many cities, including Prague, have installed blast-resistant litter bins, which can protect the surrounding area from the effects of a bomb planted inside, or could serve as a disposal for a suspected bomb placed nearby. Now, Czech scientists have come up with a new prototype of a bomb resistant bin, using completely new materials.

A report in the weekly news magazine Euro suggests the Czech power giant ČEZ intends to delay a final decision on whether to expand the Temelín nuclear plant by at least 12 months. ČEZ is due to announce a winner for the multi-billion dollar tender this autumn; a ČEZ official quoted in the magazine now says that even if a winner is chosen this year, the final contract may not be signed until the autumn of 2014.

Just two months after it was launched the reconstruction of the country’s main highway, linking the Prague and Brno, has hit a snag. Work on a nine-kilometer stretch of the road has ground to a halt due to what the firm undertaking the reconstruction describes as “unexpected problems”.

Prague residents and visitors may have noticed during their wanderings small brass plaques set into the pavement in front of apartment blocks and houses. They are ‘Stolpersteine’, literally ‘stumbling stones’, originally the work of a German artist named Gunter Demnig who wanted to remind residents in his city of Cologne of the victims of the Nazis who once lived there. The project has since spread across Europe, and this morning the latest ‘Stolperstein’ was laid in Prague, outside the last home of the Czech writer and journalist Milena