Current Affairs | All stories

After months of speculation, Czech tennis men’s No.1 Tomáš Berdych announced he will have a new coach for 2015: Venezuelan former player Daniel Vallverdu. Vallverdu, who was part of the coaching team headed by Ivan Lendl which led Scotsman Andy Murray to triumph at Wimbledon, the US Open and the London Olympics, replaces Tomáš Krupa. Berdych made the announcement on Tuesday on facebook.

The Czech cabinet on Monday reaffirmed its full support for EU sanctions against Russia. A Foreign Ministry report concluded that the sanctions were having a tangible effect on the Russian economy and should remain in place until Russia changed its stance on Ukraine.

The Astronomical Institute of the Czech Republic has asked members of the public for help in looking for parts of a meteor, classified as a bolide, which lit up the evening sky over the region of Česko-Moravská Vysočina (the Czech-Moravian highlands) last Tuesday. The meteor broke up in different pieces and some are thought to have fallen near Ždár nad Sazavou. Researchers gleaned a wealth of information from the event; now they are hoping a chunk of the original object will be found on the ground.

The Czech Defense Minister Martin Stropnický paid a morale-boosting visit to Czech troops in Afghanistan on Sunday ahead of the Christmas holidays. Although NATO’s ISAF mission in the country is slowly drawing to an end and many countries are pulling out their troops, the Czech contingent will remain to serve in NATO’s non-combat operation Resolute Support.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against two Czech women seeking to challenge national legislation effectively banning home births with midwives serving as formal medical assistants. The petitioners both argued that the Czech law violated their human rights, a claim rejected by the court, and are now planning to appeal the verdict.

There are currently some 150,000 people in the Czech Republic suffering from various forms of dementia, most frequently Alzheimer’s disease. That is relatively few compared to some other European countries. But experts warn that the number is rapidly increasing due to the ageing Czech population, and there is no official strategy in place either to combat the disease or to coordinate care for sufferers. I discussed the issue with Ondřej Mátl, co-author of a freshly released report on the state of dementia in the country.

The annual DesignSupermarket gets underway in Prague on Thursday. Now in its eighth year, the event – which organizers call a selling exhibition – is an alternative to commercial shopping in crowded malls, offering a selection of hundreds of designer items. The event was originally established for young local designers who didn’t have an outlet for their products. I asked Darina Zavadilová, the head of DesignSupermarket, if this was still the case:

A munitions depot outside a village in eastern Moravia continues to make headlines in the Czech Republic. Hours after a pyrotechnics expert said that blasts there last week were unlikely to have been accidental, the site saw fresh blasts on Tuesday night – further delaying complicated clean-up work.

Students in Ostrava in the east of the country, in cooperation with the humanitarian aid organization ADRA, are taking part in a project to try and raise money for children in western Ukraine, specifically in Mukačevo where the charity supports a local school; students in the Czech Republic have been baking pre-Christmas goods to raise money to help.

In the Czech Republic, the use of illicit drugs such as pervetin (methamphetamine) rose significantly over the last ten years but it is the abuse of a legal substance, alcohol, which presents an even bigger problem. Those are two of the main findings in an annual report just released about the state of drug abuse in the country.