Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

News and Topical Issue. In the first part of the show, you will hear an interview with Bocuse d’Or Slovakia 2021 winner Peter Duranský as well as an interview with a member of jury Radislav Nackin. Both interviews were prepared by our colleague Elena Seeber. And then you will hear an interview with Zuzana Révészová who will present a new cultural plan for Košice.

News and Topical Issue. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the renowned Slovak politician and diplomat, face of the 1960s liberalisation in Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček. On the show today, we will tell you how 21st August 1968 changed the life for Alexander Dubček as well as the entire Czechoslovakia.

Commemorating 100th birth anniversary of Alexander Dubček, we will be speaking to producers of the 2018 film Dubček. In the rerun of this part of our SLOVAK NAMEDAYS series, you can hear ex-members of RSI English team praising the name of Katarína whose nameday is exactly November 25.

This week we get in touch with the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and speak to its head, Dr. Cecilia Rokusek, about what special Slovak is on display there at the moment. On Wednesday, we also look on the life of Slovak politician Alexander Dubček, face of the so-called Prague Spring of the late 1960s. He was born 100 years ago.

Repeat: Recent years have seen a sharp increase in attempts by social media platforms like Google or Facebook to exercise control over what their users are allowed to post or share online. Driving this phenomenon has been the widespread feeling that these companies are in some sense like publishers, and therefore responsible for what users do on their sites – a feeling that has intensified as these platforms have become more politicised and their content more controversial. But are social media sites really like publishers? Or are they more like neutral internet service providers that bear no responsibility for what their users do online? Jonathan speaks with Robert Moro of the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, who specialises in AI and its use on social media, about these very questions. – What’s important in a good doctor is to know practically how to do whatever needs to be done for the patient. Knowing a lot of background theory is not so important. Right? Wrong, according to Professor Ivan Varga of Comenius University’s Faculty of Medicine in Bratislava, and winner of the 2020 ESET Outstanding Academic award. He believes that our future doctors – some of whom are now his students – would be lost in their practice without a strong theoretical knowledge of the functioning of a healthy human body. Jonathan caught up with him recently, to ask why.

News and Topical issue. On Wednesday, three laureates were presented with White Crow awards as a way of distinguishing them as people who have shown courage and defended the public good. Listen to the interviews with these three special women in the first story of today followed by a rerun of an interview with Jan Cernecky from the State Nature Conservancy of the Slovak Republic with whom we discussed what ecosystem services are and what is their value and role in our society.

news and Topical Issue. In January, a deposit return system for beverage packaging is set to start in Slovakia. We interviewed a representative of the recycling company to find out more. In the middle of November, a new bus service operator started in Bratislava region facing one major struggle - a lack of drivers.

The expression SAMIZDAT refers to magazines, books, newspapers or other documents that were self-published – it means without the approval of a totalitarian regime. Czech and Slovak samizdat literature collected in the Libri Prohibita library in Prague has been listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The fact that self-published literature was printed in Slovakia shows the will of its citizens to fight for freedom. Why to attend a photography festival at the time of selfies?

17th November is the day when Slovakia observes the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy. It goes back to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when the totalitarian communist regime in then Czechoslovakia was abolished after 45 years. On the show today, you can look forward to two interesting stories that reflect the importance of freedom and democracy as perceived back then, but also today. Such as the one of Nadia Conway, who was born in Prague, lived in Poprad, but after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she fled to the UK. There she waited for the change of the regime in her home country. That came in the autumn of 1989. But before we get to the story of returning home after the fall of the totalitarian regime, we will speak about one of the political personalities closely tied with the regime in fact. Alexander Dubček was one of the most popular communist politicians in the late 1960s, during the so-called Prague Spring. After the Soviet invasion he was pushed aside, even banned from appearing in public. During the Velvet Revolution, he once again rose to popular glory. In a few days we will commemorate 100 years since Dubček‘s birth. On the show today, we will speak about his early childhood, spent in a utopist commune in Kyrgyzstan.

Now that Russian natural gas supplier Gazprom has replenished Russia’s gas storage facilities and started to export more oil to Europe in early November, as promised, Europe’s energy crisis has begun to subside. But could the EU have avoided the crisis altogether, as some suggest, by signing more long term contracts with Gazprom at fixed prices – rather than buying its gas at current market prices only? Jonathan puts this question to Alexander Duleba, an expert in EU energy security and in relations with Russia. – Not everyone has the natural aptitude for scientific work, and among those that do, not everyone discovers it or chooses such a career. Jonathan speaks with Jakub Zavodny, a software developer living and working in Switzerland whose career path was shaped as a teenager here in Slovakia by his participation in science and math competitions – in which he excelled.