For today's show: the News; an alternative statue of Holy Trinity created on Olomouc’s Upper Square; 1970s “bespectacled” rail veterans to get new lease on life; and for out feature, another edition of Prague Off the Beaten Track: Prague’s Little Hanoi.

What Czech films will compete at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival this year? We talk to two laureates of the 2025 Medal for Merit in Diplomacy awards and US journalist Matt Welch talks about his years in Prague.

Matt Welch was among the first wave of young Westerners who flooded into Prague in the early 1990s. Today a prominent journalist and commentator in his native US, back then he was one of the founders of Prognosis, Czechoslovakia’s first English-language newspaper. And Welch shared lots of colourful recollections of that formative period of his life from his study in New York.

News; Czech PM calls National Security Council meeting over suspect bitcoin transaction; The Netherlands send a bell made of Russian missiles from Ukraine to Prague’s Old Town; Beavers’ comeback: How a once-extinct species is reshaping the Czech landscape.

In this weekend on Czechia in 30 Minutes, we hear from Martina Šmídová—a young Moravian woman born after 1990. She talks about building a new life in Thailand, what it means to belong to the Millennial generation, and how old labels like “Czechoslovakia” still follow her. A brief but insightful look at how younger Czechs see the world—and how the world sees them.

Born free, growing up wired: Meet Czechia’s digital generation, Twenty years of baby boxes in Czechia: One adoptive father’s perspective, Jeffrey Martin on mapping Prague’s streets in 1.3 million photos, news

For today's show: the News; Czech government holds China responsible for cyber-attack on Ministry of Foreign Affairs network; new mural at Prague’s Letná pays tribute to Milada Horáková; an interview with Czech UN Youth Delegate Veronika Novotná on the mental health crisis of our time and what the UN can do about it.

News; Čapek’s Letters from England, signed by WWII paratroopers, exhibited; Prague celebrates specialty coffee at Filtruj! 2025 festival; Dr. Tomáš Páleníček on psychedelics in psychiatric treatment.

Dr. Tomáš Páleníček is a leading Czech proponent of the use of psychedelics in certain kinds of psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist and several colleagues recently appeared in a documentary named Doctor on a Trip that followed them to the Amazon rainforest, where they mapped brain activity during ceremonies centred on ayahuasca, a traditional hallucinogenic drink. I spoke to Páleníček at our Prague studios.