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The Supreme Audit Office has issued an indictment of the Czech Ministry of Education, saying it failed to prepare for inclusion in the country’s schools. Despite total funding of no less than CZK 32 billion, neither schools nor teachers were ready for changes aimed at helping children with special educational needs, the watchdog said.

Ostrava is the third-largest city in the Czech Republic. A former coal-mining and heavy industry center in the extreme north-east of the country, it has undergone a major urban renewal program. Singer and poet Jaromir Nohavica helps uncover its hidden beauty.

Scientists at the Czech Aerospace Research Centre, or VZLÚ, hope to launch a second nanosatellite into orbit within weeks. The first, developed in tandem with several Czech engineering firms and universities, has been circling the Earth now for three years – an engineering triumph, as tiny satellites are especially vulnerable to cosmic radiation.

The European Commission has signed a contract with Gilead Sciences, the company behind remdesivir, that will make the drug available to around 500,000 patients.The drug will certainly be necessary if vaccination is not widespread, says Doctor Tomáš Cihlář, who is Gilead Sciences’ vicepresident for virology and the leader of the research team that developed redemsivir. He spoke to Czech Radio earlier this week in an exclusive interview.

The Czech government on Thursday slammed the breaks on cultural and sports life in the country in an effort to curb what Health Minister Roman Prymula described as an alarming spread of coronavirus infection. He appealed to the public to show discipline in order for the country to avoid a catastrophic scenario.

The Czech branch of the Salvation Army has called for the establishment of special quarantine facilities for the homeless in all regions of the Czech Republic. Amidst a surge in the number of new cases of Covid-19 in the country, ordinary shelters for the homeless could easily become hotspots for an uncontrolled spread of the disease.

Thursday is Sokol Memorial Day, an official “day of significance” on the Czech calendar since last year. It honours the memory of hundreds of members of the nation’s oldest athletics association arrested by the Gestapo on the night of October 7 to 8, 1941, tortured and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Few survived the war.

Tuesday saw the highest rise in new COVID-19 cases yet recorded both in Prague and the wider Czech Republic. While the Ministry of Health has since announced that it will harden its countermeasures, not all Czech medical practitioners are on the same page. Some have signed a petition which warns that government countermeasures are in fact more damaging than the virus.

A move is afoot to put nobleman Josef Václav Radecký of Radče – arguably the greatest Czech military commander in history – back on a pedestal. A bronze statue of Radecký, a Bohemian count and Austrian field marshal, took pride of place in Prague’s Lesser Town square for six decades, up until Czechoslovakia declared independence. Ever since, the imposing statue (minus the original stone plinth) has languished in the Lapidarium of the National Museum, alongside scores of others associated with the Habsburg Monarchy, either spontaneously or deliberately removed as the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled.

The biggest annual design festival in the Czech Republic, Designblok, gets underway in Prague on Wednesday. Due to the state of emergency, the 22nd edition of the event is limited to exhibitions, the accompanying lectures, workshops and events having had to be cancelled. I caught up with the festival’s director, Jana Zielinski, at Designblok’s new centre, a former monastery of Saint Gabriel at Prague’s District of Smíchov, and I started by asking her about the choice of this year’s main theme, Passion.