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Around twenty homeless people will get a chance to work in the Siemens engineering company. The firm on Thursday announced its plan to employ the homeless within its new programme Restart@Siemens, which has just got underway. The project is sponsored by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and Siemens will also collaborate with a number of charities.

The Christian Democrats are pushing to make Good Friday a state holiday in the Czech Republic, as it is in several European states. Previous attempts to give workers a day off on the religious holiday have failed. However, a senior party figure says the Christian Democrats are now hopeful of finding support for the revival of a tradition ended by the Communists.

The law on church restitutions approved by the Czech Parliament in 2012 should enable churches active in the Czech Republic to gain full independence from the state by 2030. However, changing an order that’s been in place for decades is not proving easy. In an Easter interview for Czech Radio Cardinal Miloslav Vlk slammed Czech officials for mentoring the Catholic Church and reminded them that the communist days are over.

A shiny new Metro station will from Monday serve travellers using Prague’s Václav Havel Airport. However, the Nádraží Veleslavín station has not been fitted with escalators leading to street level. To get around the problem, porters will be employed to help people with heavy luggage in what is said to be a unique service in Europe.

The Czech company Nafigate Corporation has just been awarded a prestigious award for innovation in technology by Frost & Sullivan. Several years ago the firm licensed a patent developed by the Technological University in Brno for turning used cooking oil into bioplastic. The company is continuing to develop the system for large-scale commercial use, beneficial not only in cutting waste buts also for providing biodegradable plastic in a number of fields.

Police came in for a lot of criticism in the immediate aftermath of the Uherský Brod shooting in which a gunman shot dead eight before killing himself. The main answers were given on Tuesday when the results of the internal police investigation were revealed.

People from all over the world will soon have a chance to visit the office of the late Czech president Václav Havel. Although the office won’t open its door to the public, it will be accessible on-line. Next Monday, the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation Vize 97 will launch a virtual tour of the space, where Mr Havel worked for the last eight years of his life.

Thousands of Czechs have been lining roads and motorways to welcome US soldiers passing through the country after manoeuvres in the Baltics. This public support has reportedly been more enthusiastic than on other stages on their trek – evidently in response to media coverage of anti-American voices in recent weeks.

A US military convoy will arrive in the Czech Republic at the weekend and is expected to be met by both supporters as well as demonstrations in areas, divided over NATO membership over Russian intervention in Ukraine. Critics charge that opposition to the convoy has been artificially whipped up by groups long opposed to NATO membership. A poll conducted by the STEM agency released on Thursday suggested that in fact a vast majority of Czechs – 82 percent – had no issue with the convoy travelling through Czech territory.

Europe is marking twenty years since the creation the Schengen border-free zone allowing free movement of goods, information, money and people. The Czech Republic joined Schengen eight years ago and, in addition to the enormous benefits membership brought, the authorities are increasingly dealing with the downside: illegal migrants and drug smuggling.