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There are more than half a million foreigners living in the Czech Republic, according to data from the Ministry of Interior. With the COVID-19 epidemic in full swing across Europe they have found themselves in a strange situation in recent weeks, living in a country tightly restricted by quarantine and often unable to travel home to visit and support their families. Radio Prague International spoke to some of them to find out more about how they have been impacted by the situation and what they think of the measures that have been taken.

Women in this part of the world have had the right to vote since the first Czechoslovak Constitution was approved a century ago. However, Czechs have never had a female prime minister or president and the vast majority of the country’s politicians are still men. Why is that? And how likely is change in this regard?

In the previous episodes of the Czechs in Brexit Britain series, we explored what worries the local Czech community about Brexit and the new business ties the country is trying to establish with Britain. In our closing feature we will look closer at the Czech community itself and some of the clubs and institutions that they have built in the United Kingdom.

Eva Spekhorstova has a passion for languages. At the age of 15 she already speaks 17 languages and has an insatiable thirst to learn more as different cultures open up to her. When she visited Radio Prague’s studio we spoke about what attracts her to foreign languages, how she goes about learning them and how different languages relate to her emotions. I began by asking her at what age she first started learning foreign languages.

In addition to the Czech Republic financing developing aid projects around the world, the network of Czech embassies provides aid in small-scale local projects. The Czech Embassy in Cambodia recently joined forces with the Japanese Embassy and the French Development Agency to fund a local project in which two community kindergartens were built in the villages of Trapeing Chrab and Beung Preah. The kindergartens, with complementary infrastructure, were handed over to the locals late last year and are now attended by close to 70 children under the

Karel Čapek was a leading Czech interwar novelist, playwright and journalist and is perhaps most remembered for works of science fiction such as The War with the Newts and R.U.R., which gave the world the word “robot”. But did you know that Čapek was also a travel writer? His pieces from around Europe are the focus of the book In Search of a Shared Expression by Mirna Solic, a lecturer at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. I spoke to her on the phone from Scotland.

The past two years have seen a revitalization in Czech-Indian ties, with intensified cooperation in the academic and business spheres as well as people to people contacts. The driving force behind this effort is the Indian ambassador to the Czech Republic Narinder Chauhan. When the ambassador visited Radio Prague International this week we spoke about the strong bonds between the two nations, the growing Indian community in this country and her life in Prague. I began by asking her how far back Czech-Indian relations actually go.

Open For Business, a coalition of leading global companies dedicated to furthering LGBT+ inclusion, has published a new brief on the Czech Republic making an “economic and business case” for all couples, regardless of sexual orientation, having the right to marry and adopt children. Working together with Jsme fér, a Czech NGO which helped introduce same-sex marriage legislation, the coalition has compiled evidence that LGBT+ discrimination costs this country 0.1 to 0.7 percent of its GDP each year. I spoke to representatives of both groups to learn

The picturesque Georgian village of Kvenobani, nestling in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, is a long way to go to discover the secret of tea- making. But the experience is authentic and those adventurous enough to head there can make up their minds between spending a whole month to care for their “own” tea-garden, to grow and process their own tea from scratch or attend a four-day workshop in which Czech tea enthusiast Petr Sič will teach them the art of tea making.

Almost every fifth Czech company faced a cyberattack last year, a rise of 20 percent year on year, according to data released by the Czech Statistics Office. The most common form of cyberattack was the so-called “distributed denial-of-service”, triggering a collapse of normal traffic by overwhelming the server. However hackers also often deployed extortion programs known as “ransomware” that make data or even an entire system inaccessible until the attacker is paid off.