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Exactly 400 years ago, Habsburg Catholic authorities put three nobles, seven knights, and 17 burghers to death on Prague’s Old Town Square. Their executions – victor’s justice – came many months after the defeat of the reformist Bohemians in the seminal Battle of White Mountain. Twenty-seven white stone crosses have long been embedded in the historic square, paying tribute to the men whom Czechs consider to be martyrs of the nation.

After a sluggish start, the Czech Republic’s Covid vaccination programme is currently moving on apace. Now in a bid to reach even more people the government is set to launch “walk-in” vaccinations in under a month’s time, while the over 12s will be able to register for inoculation from the start of July.

Brexit meant the loss of a natural ally for the Czech Republic within the European Union, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said at Thursday’s Multiple Challenges for Transatlantic Partnerships conference in Prague’s Congress Centre. Mr Babiš argued for less bureaucracy and less regulation within the union, but also expressed a desire to expand the EU into the Western Balkans and intensify technological research and cooperation with the United States.

In part two of our interview with Dr Jan Koura from the Cold War Research Group at Charles University, we look at Czechoslovak economic, political and educational involvement in the Third World during the Cold War. Czechoslovakia sought not just to bring socialism into Africa and Latin America, but also to establish strong economic ties that would benefit its own industry, he says.

The Czech Republic’s readiness to fight cancer is above average, suggests an annual survey compiled by the British business weekly Economist. According to the so-called Index of Cancer Preparedness, which includes 29 countries from all over the world, the Czech Republic is eighth best prepared for what the Economist calls a global cancer epidemic.

Czech Monika Hertlová and her partner Steve Green have devoted the past couple of years to cleaning up waters along the Cornish coastline. In 2017, they established an NGO called Clean Ocean Sailing, which hosts eco-sailing expeditions around Cornwall and beyond, raising awareness of pollution in the oceans and collecting plastic waste from remote areas of the coast. They recently received an award by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in recognition of their efforts.

An era spanning over a century came to a close in the Czech Republic on Thursday with the removal of the country’s last telephone booth still containing a phone in a village in Central Bohemia. Just a couple of decades ago there were more than 30,000 of them.

Until 2011, the castle of Moravský Krumlov was home to the series of paintings by Alphonse Mucha known as The Slav Epic. A pair of skeletons unearthed in the region two decades ago tell a very different tale – that of two tiny prehistoric women who likely worked in some of the largest mines in Europe.

Petra Hůlová was fresh out of university when she burst onto the Czech literary scene in 2002, with her debut novel Paměť mojí babičce, or All This Belongs to Me, chronicling the lives of three generations of women in a Mongolian family. A surprise bestseller at the time, the poetic but often bleak family saga remains among the most widely read Czech books of recent decades. While set in the Mongolian steppes and capital of Ulaanbaatar, it is also a universal story of family secrets, betrayal, shame and resilience.

A world of fantasy inspired by Salvador Dali, Joan Miró and Toyen:  the 6th annual sand sculpting festival in the town of Lednice, south Moravia, boasts a collection of amazing surrealist sand sculptures. Visitors awed by the works of art are invited to give it a go and create something of their own in a special sandpit.