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The great Czech artist and illustrator Jiří Šalamoun has died at the age of 86. Šalamoun was best known for Maxipes Fík, a cartoon character loved by several generations, and also produced classic book covers and other notable designs.

A team of experts have started to reconstruct one of the four bone pyramids from the famous 14th century ossuary near the town of Kutná Hora. If everything goes according to plan, the first bell-shaped mound, made of hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls, should return to the ossuary by the end of the year.

Many expats living in the Czech Republic are considering buying a property in the country, but for a non-native speaker and foreign national this may sometimes feel like a challenge. To find out more about the most common challenges expats face in this regard we spoke to Robin Petrásek, a mortgage advisor who administers the “Czech Expats property owners group”, a Facebook group of nearly 6,000 people looking to buy or manage their property in Czechia. I began by asking him how the group came to be.

The Czech government is preparing new legislation, inspired by the so called Magnitsky Act, to better implement its sanctions on Russia, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said on Wednesday. Ministries are also coordinating on creating an updated sanctions list. Expropriating Russian-owned property is on the table too.

President Zeman’s team are constantly in the news right now. First it was reported that his head of office, Vratislav Mynář, was behind the shredding of classified documents. Now, following the widely condemned issuing of a presidential pardon, there are reports that Mynář travelled abroad on official business without the government’s knowledge. I discussed the situation with political scientist Jiří Pehe.

During the 1990s the Czech teaching cohort became more “feminised” as large numbers of male teachers opted to leave the profession and pursue a career elsewhere, according to a new study conducted by the CERGE-EI think-tank at the Czech Academy of Sciences. To find out why this happened. and what it means for the Czech education system, I spoke to one of the authors of the study, Filip Pertold.

Czech President Miloš Zeman made headlines on Tuesday after pardoning the former head of the Lány Forestry Administration, Miloš Balák. The man, a direct subordinate of the president’s head of office, recently got a three-year sentence and a CZK 1.8 million fine for manipulating a CZK 200 million public tender.

On Monday Petr Fiala put out a video saying his government’s first 100 days had not been easy, as predicted, but still they had achieved a lot. But how have the Czech prime minister and his ministers really done during the traditional bedding-in period? That’s a question I put to political scientists Petr Just.

An impressive, two-volume book dedicated to Czechoslovakia’s Communist-era architecture has recently been released by Prague’s Bigg Boss publishing house. The ambitious publication, entitled ‘Architecture 58-89’, was written by 30 experts and took more than 10 years to complete.

For the first time ever, the Czech government has a special representative for media and disinformation. His name is Michal Klíma and he has been in charge of several of the country’s leading media outlets in the past. More recently, he has also monitored the Czech media environment for the International Press Institute. I asked him why the government has decided to set up this position and what exactly will be his task.