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Czech expats from around the world gathered in Prague last week for a conference on maintaining their native language skills abroad. Czechoslovak exiles who fled the country after the war or after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, descendants of the old Czech settlers, as well as members of the younger community of Czechs who went abroad to study or work met for a two-day event held in the National Museum building in the centre of Prague to discuss their cultural and linguistic heritage.

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.

This year the whole of Europe is commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The Jewish Museum in Prague is marking the anniversary with an exhibition focused on the fate of the Jewish refugees, a chapter in history that has been largely forgotten. The exhibition entitled “The Orient in Bohemia” displays photographs that document the life of refugees but it also explores the response of the local population to the wave of migrants. I visited the Jewish Museum’s Robert Guttman Gallery to see the exhibition and talk to its

A one-of-a-kind instrument called raketon made its first public appearance three years ago in a museum exhibit, but this week it had its debut in a contemporary classical music concert, together with Prague’s Berg Orchestra. I had a chance to speak to Raketon’s inventor Michal Cimala and to composer Jakub Rataj who mastered this simple and elegant instrument and wrote the first orchestral piece that includes it. Both of them perform on the raketon as well by plucking, striking and touching its two strings with bows, mallets and even milk

Czech students are sought after not just by local universities and colleges, but also by their European counterparts as student numbers dwindle across the continent. But while they are faced with more choice, Czech students also face a more difficult jobs market and the need to mark themselves out from the rest. Chris Johnstone looks at the evolving higher education market.

Almost eighty years after her ordination, the world’s first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, has been honoured at the former Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. Several of her successors, including the first American female rabbi Sally Priesand, attended the ceremony in Terezín. Since Jonas’ times, women have been serving the religious needs of hundreds of congregations around the world – but for the largely secular Czech Jewish community, there are no women rabbis in sight.

The Czech Republic boasts perhaps one of the strangest associations around, a group dedicated to climbing industrial chimneys in their spare time. And the more than 30 year old organisation, which started with a small group of teenagers in the Communist era climbing a heat plant chimney at night in the suburbs of Prague is now going from strength to strength. It is though, getting more difficult to find new chimneys to climb.

Low emission zones, where the worst polluting vehicles are banned from city centres, were first introduced in Germany in 2008 and have since spread rapidly there and across Europe. But the Czech Republic has so far stood apart from the trend. That now looks like it is about to change with the capital city taking a lead.

A housing crisis has developed over the last two decades in the Czech Republic with the stock of local council accommodation for the least well off shrinking as flats and houses were sold off while the numbers of those needing an affordable roof over their heads increased. The government is now working on putting together an all-embracing policy to address the problems but there are no illusions this will be an easy task.

Last week’s decision by a Bratislava court that Czech finance minister Andrej Babiš was falsely described as being an agent of the Communist era secret police has sparked a lively debate about the apparent clearing of his name. Part of that debate focuses on how the StB functioned and whom it recruited. We look at the working of the StB in former Czechoslovakia and the ongoing arguments about the Babiš’ affair.