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Among many who have come to the Czech Republic to mark this Saturday’s 75th anniversary of the Nazis’ annihilation of Lidice is Alan Gerrard of the group Lidice Lives, which is based in the UK city of Stoke-on-Trent. It is a kind of social media-based successor to Lidice Shall Live, a major initiative to rebuild the Czech village launched in Stoke in September 1942 by the politician Sir Barnett Stross. When we spoke, I asked Gerrard whether he had been inspired by Stross’s work.

What is already being described as the Prague exhibition event of the year opened to the public on the banks of the River Vltava today. Gott My Life is a lavish tribute to the legendary Czech pop ikon Karel Gott looking back at his 60 years of success.

While some pundits praised Social Democrats leader Bohuslav Sobotka for his handling of the recent government crisis, it doesn’t seem to have benefited his party, who a recent opinion poll put in fourth place on just 10 percent support. In the meantime, there have been reports that Prime Minister Sobotka could be replaced as party chairman even before October’s elections. So why are the Social Democrats in such poor shape at the moment? That’s a question I put to political scientist Jiří Pehe.

The current hot and dry weather has created ideal conditions for the spread of the bark beetle, one of the biggest threats to the Czech Republic’s forests. Experts from the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences are now testing a new method involving sniffer dogs to detect the infestation in its early stages. I spoke to the dean of the faculty, Marek Turčáni, who is in charge of the project, and asked him how serious the beetle infestation is this year:

The Czech Republic has one of the lowest shares of female IT students within Europe. What’s even more alarming, the country comes last when it comes to the number of women working in the field, which is less than 10 percent. I spoke to Barbora Bühnová from Czechitas, an organisation trying to involve more women in IT, and I first asked her about the reasons behind this trend:

The Czech Republic will take no more migrants from Italy and Greece shared out under the European Union’s quota system. Following a cabinet meeting on Monday, Interior Minister Milan Chovanec called the existing allocation system dysfunctional and cited the worsening security situation. To date, the country has taken only 12 refugees but was to have taken in around 2,600 people.

On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Pavel Bělobrádek became the highest Czech official ever to attend the annual Sudeten German congress in Bavaria. It was the 68th such meeting of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, an organisation of German Czechoslovaks expelled after the Second World War.

Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka has added his voice to the chorus of world leaders condemning US president Donald Trump’s decision, announced on Thursday, to withdraw from, and seek a renegotiation of, the landmark Paris climate agreement.

The Czech Republic’s three most underdeveloped and economically disadvantaged regions were this week given a last chance to shape a wide ranging government plan aimed at sparking their revival. In many cases the problems are deep rooted but the government hopes they can be put on a new track.

Two hundred years ago today on June 1, 1817, the first steamboat took to the waters of the Vltava in Prague. The attempt to launch steamboat transport did not meet with immediate success for their pioneer, but they later grew to be an important and continuing feature of the Czech capital’s transport and tourist scene.