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A major exhibition of dolls’ houses from the Victoria &Albert Museum of Childhood in London is now on display in Prague. Through the stories of 12 dolls’ houses from the past 300 years, visitors to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague can follow the history of the home, everyday lives and changing family relationships.

The first major international film festival of the year, the Berlinale, gets underway on Thursday. The Czech Republic is being represented at the prestigious showcase by three films, including one starring veteran director Jiří Menzel and a documentary exploring the life of a young paramilitary leader in Slovakia. Ahead of the festival, I spoke to Markéta Šantrochová of the Czech Film Center, who will be promoting the country’s cinema in Berlin.

The Czech Republic’s new defence minister has hit the ground running. And Karla Šlechtová is clearly not worried about ruffling feathers at the ministry with questions about ongoing tenders, overall strategy and the place of the army in wider society.

One of the biggest events is taking place in the Czech computer games markets with the official launch of Kingdom Come – Deliverance. The game is the creation of a relatively new Prague studio, taking players back to the Czech lands during the troubled times of the early 15th century, with a lot riding on its success.

A group of Czech Catholics have written a letter urging Pope Francis not to prolong Cardinal Dominik Duka’s mandate as the Archbishop of Prague. Among the reasons stated in the letter are the alleged nationalist tendencies of the Church in the Czech Republic.

The annual National Marriage Week, aiming at increasing rates of marriage and children born in wedlock, gets under way in the Czech Republic on Monday. According to the data of the Czech Statistical Office, the divorce rate in the Czech Republic, which has traditionally been one of the highest in Europe, has been dropping in recent years and marriages that end in divorce last longer than before.

One of the longest running legal battles in Czech history has just taken a new turn with the possible bill for the state escalating substantially. The company Diag Human is now taking a new tack in its battle for damages and is reportedly seeking at least a billion US dollars. Prague is hiring big legal guns in the US in its defence.

The Little Owl (Athene noctua, sýček obecný in Czech) has been chosen as Bird of the Year by the Czech Society for Ornithology. Though common in Europe, Northern Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia, population numbers of the owl fallen significantly over the last half century in the Czech Republic, disappearing from farmland areas; as a result the Little Owl is on the endangered list.

Both the Czech prime minister and president have stressed that membership of the European Union and NATO are not up for discussion. The comments follow the resurgence of concerns about so-called ‘Czexit’ as party negotiations about forming a stable government continue.

Despite visionary CEO Elon Musk’s initial fears, the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, proved a major success. The rocket makes possible a heavy-lift capacity last seen with the Saturn V rockets which sent astronauts to the moon. Czech Radio spoke to SpaceX sole Czech employee David Pavlík.