Panorama | All stories

Look at some of the small town exhibitions currently underway and you can’t miss the trend – they all show vintage objects very often made up of stuff people find in their attics. The “out with the old and in with the new” fervor with which people cleaned out their attics just a few decades ago is long gone and families now treasure old family coffee grinders, foreign label-covered suitcases that belonged to seasoned family travelers or wooden weaving looms used by great grandmothers.

Three years ago Prague Zoo launched its biggest conservation project to date – helping to save the Przewalski horse from extinction. The zoo successfully breeds these Mongolian wild horses here in the Czech Republic and then transports them to the Mongolian steppes to enrich the gene pool of a small protected herd that is to help the endangered breed survive. I met up with the zoo’s spokeswoman Jana Ptáčinská Jirátová to find out how the project has been coming along.

Czech scientists from Brno’s Masaryk University have been involved in polar research since the 1980s and since 2006 they have their own polar station in Antarctica –the Johann Gregor Mendel station. For the duration of the polar summer a team of scientists from Masaryk University works at the station doing glacier research and collecting data relating to the impact of global warming on micro-organisms. The sixteen-member- team is just back from its 2014 expedition and this week I talked to the head of the team Pavel Kapler about its work.

Overcoming the language barrier is one of the main hurdles Romany children face on starting school and is one of the oft-cited reasons for putting them in “special schools” for children with learning disabilities. Deputies in the lower house are now engaged in a debate on whether to introduce a special dual-language curriculum for Romany children.

In recent years, the Czech Republic has seen Russia as an increasingly important economic partner. Czech exports to Russia have grown tenfold over the past decade, and about 70 percent of Czech oil and gas imports come from that country. But the ongoing crisis in Crimea has highlighted the risks of the Czech economy’s exposure to Russia. In this edition of Panorama, I discuss the implications of the Crimea crisis for the Czech-Russian relations with deputy foreign minister Petr Drulák and commentator Erik Best. I first asked Mr Drulák to sum up

An opinion poll conducted by the STEM agency in February of this year shows that trust in EU institutions has dropped to an all-time low, sliding from 60 percent in 2009 to a mere 34 percent this year. The dramatic slump in support comes at a time when the new center-left government has announced a change of course –vowing to bring the Czech Republic back to the EU mainstream. I spoke to the head of the STEM agency Jan Hartl about what’s behind the loss of trust and what are the present pro-EU government’s chances of turning around Czechs’ increasingly

The crisis in Ukraine continues to fill the front pages of Czech dailies and in addition to the political implications of Russia’s aggressive policy in the region, there are growing economic concerns for Czech producers who do business on eastern markets. The country’s annual exports to Ukraine are worth 33.5 billion and its exports to Russia, which have grown tenfold in the past decade, now reach 116 billion crowns annually. I spoke to the vice-president of the Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic Radek Špicar to find out how the crisis

As Europe and the U.S. grapple with the monumental task of helping Ukraine to fend off its economic collapse, NGOs and charities are working on a smaller scale to help the people of Kiev return to a normal life in the aftermath of weeks of political crisis and violent street protests. The leading Czech charity People in Need was among the first to respond to the crisis, sending doctors and medical staff to the embattled Maidan square where demonstrators came under fire from police units.

Ana Maria Janků was born in Argentina, but her link to her roots and in particular to Czech classical music is strong, thanks to the influence of her Czech parents. Today she is taking her own and her parent’s Czech legacy further by promoting Czech music at the Czech cultural centre in Buenos Aires. When she visited Radio Prague’s studio a few days ago we spoke about the fulfillment this brings her and why her work at the center has become the pivot of her life.

In its policy statement approved this week, the new centre-left government promises to bring the Czech Republic back to the EU mainstream, reaffirm its commitment to EU integration and take a more active part in shaping the EU’s future. I spoke to Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Petr Drulák about the Foreign Ministry’s priorities and began by asking him how it would go about erasing the country’s troublemaker image in the European Union.