In Focus | All stories

Charity organizations say that Czechs are particularly generous in times of crisis – aid to tsunami, flood and earthquake victims has always been fast and generous, all the more so, when they have a special affinity to the town or region in need. When Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which has a large community of Czech expats, was ravaged by floods in 2008 Czechs promptly donated close to a million crowns in aid for the town.

Last week saw the 5th inception of Sexistické prasátečko (Sexist Little Pig), a competition run by the NGO Nesehnutí critical of sexism in advertising. The anti-award is voted on by members of the public and by a jury annually; some of the entries this year featured wanna-be porn starlets licking a strip of aluminium (We love aluminium!) and a naked man hiding his private parts under a drape.

The Czech Republic has been experiencing a sort of mini baby boom for the past six or so years, with one of the first generations of well-educated Czech women deciding to put off motherhood until their thirties. These mothers, who had held high-level jobs, travelled around the world and started their own businesses before having their first child, have initially enjoyed the government-subsidized maternity leave, but for many of them this benefit turned into a burden.

With a month or so to go before Christmas, shoppers in the Czech Republic have begun hitting stores at a feverish pace – good news, of course, for retailers. The holidays are perhaps most important for sellers of toys and games! December basically pays for the rest of the year. In this week’s In Focus, I visit Tomovy hry – a shop in Prague specialising in hobby games.

Přiběh kmotra (A Godfather’s Story) opened in Czech cinemas last month and has attracted both thriller fans and those who remember the turbulent 1990s, when Czech society underwent a major transformation but also saw the rise of organised crime. The story is both about underworld bosses who conducted illegal operations in the hundreds of millions and left a bloody trail in their wake and the cops who tried to stop them.

One of this year’s prestigious Via Bona awards for philanthropy, from the Via Foundation, went to the charity called Run with Those That Can’t. Started five years ago by a group of Czech and international medical students in Prague, RWTTC helps people with disabilities who are unable to walk or run participate in half-marathons and other running events. Volunteers help push special sports strollers at the events, allowing the riders experience the thrill of crossing the finish line.

Babak Mahdian is an award-winning scientist and businessman who heads ImageMetry – a company which developed cutting-edge software called Verifeyed for use by insurers, law-enforcement agencies, and other clients to verify the authenticity of digital images and uncover digital fraud. In an age when any image on the internet can be manipulated within minutes or seconds, knowledge of the source – its digital fingerprint – as well as the sure-fire ability to uncover tampering is more important than ever.

International and Czech NGOs are campaigning in support of Tatiana Paraskevich, a Russian citizen held in Czech custody pending extradition over large-scale fraud she allegedly committed in Kazakhstan. But her supporters tell a different story: she and her family have been intimated by Kazakh and Russian authorities to provide evidence against Kazakhstan’s opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov.

Detergents, painkillers and contraceptives are things we use daily. What most of us don’t realize is that all of them contribute to the presence of toxins in our rivers and even drinking water. A special research team at Brno’s Masaryk University is now working to ascertain what toxins pass through water treatment plants and how they could be more effectively eliminated. I spoke to the head of the team prof. Luděk Bláha about the problems involved.

A memorandum, released by the advocacy group Amnesty International last week, calls on the Czech Foreign Ministry to improve the process of approving arms deals for local weapons producers. The analysis says that more than 38% of the total weapons exports in 2012 went to countries where human rights are not respected and where the political systems are barely democratic. This, the organization claims, hurts the positive image of the Czech Republic abroad and contributes to atrocities and violence perpetrated in certain countries. RP spoke to Andor