Talking Point | All stories

On January 1, this coming Thursday, the Czech Republic takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union, becoming only the second ex-communist country after Slovenia to helm the 27-state bloc. However, some fear the Czech EU presidency could be overshadowed by the Czech president, Václav Klaus. Though his position is largely symbolic, Mr Klaus’s fiery anti-EU rhetoric has been receiving a great deal of international attention – and leading many to ask what impact he is likely to have on the Czech presidency.

Glassmaking - one of the trademarks of the Czech Republic – is going through hard times. This autumn, the biggest Czech glassmaker, Bohemia Crystalex trading, was forced to close down two of its four plants and sack nearly 2,000 employees in order to stay afloat. Does that mark the end of the country’s long glassmaking tradition? And what will other producers do to avoid getting into a similar situation?

This is the story of three English-speaking expats, who arrived in Prague during the post-Velvet Revolution “golden-age” and who ended up becoming entrepreneurs, serving the very communities of which they had become a part. Todd Benson, Bryn Perkins and Martin Howlings are the respective heads of Prague.tv, Praguemonitor.com and Expats.cz, three websites that both serve English-speaking Czechs in Prague as well as give English-speakers across the world a window into this small country at the heart of Europe. Today, the expat community in Prague

At his office in downtown Prague, Jan Hájek describes his company’s unusual services. They sell experiences, zážitky in Czech, and the name of their firm is zážitky.cz. The odd thing is that to get to their internet site you have to use either the address zazitky.cz or zážitky.com. The former, like all domain names ending in .cz, does not allow an important feature of the Czech language: diacritics (such as the ‘little hook’ on the letter ř). But why not?

Today, energy from nuclear power plants provides for roughly a third of the Czech Republic’s overall electricity consumption. There are in fact six operating nuclear power plant units – four of them have been operating for twenty years in Dukovany, and two of them have been operating for almost ten years in Temelín, in south Bohemia. The rest of the Czech Republic’s energy needs are met by domestic coal as well as imported gas. But the country has recently begun to wrestle with how it will meet its energy needs in the future, and more nuclear power

The Czech Republic boasts one of the lowest rates of prenatal and natal mortalities in the world, yet paradoxically, criticism of Czech maternity hospitals is growing. Mothers complain that doctors regard childbirth as a strictly medical procedure, forgetting that it is first and foremost a natural process and as such should be directed by the mothers themselves. Some mothers who have previously given birth at maternity hospitals are so dissatisfied with the experience that they opt to bring their second child into the world at home with the help

“Any reason for sorting waste is a good one” is a slogan underlining a current TV campaign promoting recycling in the Czech Republic, and most Czechs would agree recycling is a necessity. By and large, Czechs are conscientious recyclers, with around 70 percent regularly recycling plastics, paper, glass and other materials. In fact, statistics recently released by Eurostat revealed that Czechs are leaders when it comes to plastics: in 2006 they recycled 44 percent of PET beverage bottles and other packaging – which is 3 percent more than traditional

It's hard to pick up a newspaper anywhere these days without reading about the global economic meltdown precipitated by the collapse of a number of US banks, which has sent shockwaves across the globe. Remarkably, the Czech Republic and Central Europe seem to be relatively insulated from the crisis.

I’m standing in the exhibition hall of the Czech Senate and in front of me is an official copy of the Munich Agreement, the notorious 1938 document that ceded the Sudeten territories in Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. It is a four page document that is written in German, with a series of numbered points on it. At the bottom of the document are the clearly visible signatures of Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. But this act of appeasement didn’t work and ended up leading to the Second

Czech law is structured in such a way that non-prescription drugs can be freely advertised, while prescription drugs cannot. This has led to a totally unregulated culture of lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, desperate to get doctors to take notice of their prescription drugs. Sometimes, these lobbying efforts take the form of free pens or magazines and leaflets, but other times, they include far more expensive free gifts and even exotic holidays under the guise of inviting doctors to so called “conferences.”