Talking Point | All stories

In this week's Talking Point, we reflect on the life of a young boy who perished at Auschwitz and whose recently found diary has just been published in Prague. This edition is part of a special Holocaust series on Radio Prague this week, in honour of this Thursday marking Holocaust Memorial Day, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The Irish have it since March 2004, the Italians for about a week and the Czechs may be added to the list sooner than most of them would expect. I'm talking about countries that have severely curtailed smoking in public places. How soon could this become a reality, how do ordinary Czechs feel about it, and are small restaurants and bars dreading the day?

The number of students studying modern languages at British universities has been on the wane in recent years, as is the trend throughout much of Europe. There are fewer and fewer degree programmes in "minority languages" like Czech on offer in the United Kingdom, with long-term governmental funding at risk.

On Monday, primary and secondary school children went back to their classrooms after their Christmas holidays. With a new schools law in effect, they will be facing new teaching and learning methods. In today's Talking Point, we look at the state of the education system in the Czech Republic.

Ukraine went to the polls this Sunday for a re-run of the second round of the presidential election. With most votes counted, the western-leaning opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko is said to have taken an unbeatable lead over the Moscow-backed opponent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

The wheels of justice are moving too slowly. That's what the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has been saying in case after case against the Czech government. This year alone, the government lost at least a dozen cases in which Czechs claim their cases have lingering in the Czech court system for years. Experts tell us what's behind the problem and what might be a solution.

Although Czechs have never been too eager to go to war, arms production has played an important role in the Czech economy. The Czechoslovak army before the Second World War was one of the best equipped in Europe, in the face of a feared German invasion. After the war, communist Czechoslovakia continued in the tradition of massive armament production. Czechoslovak weapons were used in a number of conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The infamous Czech-made explosive Semtex was used in several terrorist attacks. Arms production

The small town of Terezin in northern Bohemia is known to most people for its tragic fate during the Second World War. The Nazis turned the whole town into a ghetto where tens of thousands of Jews from throughout Europe were held. Most died, either in Terezin itself or when they were sent on to the death camps in the east.

The agriculture chapter was the most complicated part of the negotiations before the accession of the Czech Republic into the EU in May this year. The most criticism came down on Czech veterinary controls and the fragmentary legislation governing them. For their part farmers feared new competition, lower sales figures and even bankruptcy. Now, nearly 7 months down the line, farmers are in a position to compare the situation with what went before and evaluate how useful and fair the EU has been to the Czech farming sector.

To mark the 15th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Nikola Brabenec set out to speak with the now full grown children of dissidents involved in Charter 77, the human rights declaration which brought together the dissident movement.