Current Affairs | All stories

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka is on a four day visit to Japan, focussed primarily on tapping new opportunities in the field of business and defence cooperation. On Wednesday he was received by Japan’s crown prince Naruhito for a meeting that was far from formal.

As artistic director of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Karel Och has the ultimate say over the programming of the region’s biggest event of its kind. Just ahead of the 52nd edition – which gets underway on Friday – I put a number of questions to Och. The first: Are there any programme sections that he feels merit special attention?

As well as the historic monuments, visitors to Prague might be struck by the busy three and four lane highway in both directions that dissects the city centre and complicates access to many landmarks and cultural sites. The city has called in the studio of a world famous Danish architect to suggest how the so-called Magistrale can be tamed and transformed.

The Czech Republic last month took over the chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. In an address to a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Tuesday, the Czech foreign minister outlined Prague’s priorities for its term at the helm.

The country’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes on Tuesday launched a new project to commemorate victims of former Czechoslovakia’s communist regime. Called “Last Address”, the idea was inspired by similar initiatives in Russia. Within the project, plaques will be installed at victims’ final addresses – recalling their lives and what they stood for, for which they died.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen is in Prague for his first official visit to Czech Republic since taking office in January of this year. The former Green Party leader arrived by train which was several minutes late pulling into Prague’s Main Railway Station, inadvertently highlighting one of the key issues on the agenda of the upcoming talks: the need to improve road and rail links between the two neighbor states. I asked Jan Kovář from the Prague Institute of International Relations about the main sticking points in bilateral relations

With wages set to a major issue in looming Czech parliamentary elections, a major strike by Volkswagen workers in neighbouring Slovakia has grabbed a lot of attention. Car production is the leading manufacturing sector in both countries with the German auto producer also the parent company of leading Czech producer Škoda Auto.

Activists from the Czech Republic and abroad met at Lety, South Bohemia, on Saturday, the site of a labour and later concentration camp where Roma were interned and died during WWII. They were aiming to keep pressure on the government to finally remove a pig farm at the site which has been an insult to the victims who suffered or died there and their descendants, for decades.

The Czech Foreign Ministry on Friday handed out Gratias Agit awards to fifteen Czech expatriates and foreigners for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic abroad. This year’s recipients included Jiří Bělohlávek, the late conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, or speed skater Martina Sáblíková.

A two-day EU summit in Brussels started on Thursday with a spat between the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron and countries of the Visegrad group. Expressing his commitment to put the EU project back on track, the French leader accused the V4 of defying Europe’s principles and values by rejecting the EC’s migrant quotas.