Czech news in brief for August 10: Monday's top morning headlines

Prague sweats through one more scorcher before a brief cooldown; developers keep carving apartments into smaller and smaller slices, and a group of Ukrainian veterans is teaching ordinary Czechs to fly FPV drones on a meadow outside the city. Good morning, here's your mix.

The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute has widened its heat warning for Monday, with most of the country expected to see afternoon highs of 29 to 33°C and Prague, the Elbe region, and southern Moravia running hottest. Monday itself will push higher still, with maximums of 31 to 36°C forecast before a brief cooldown later in the week. Overnight lows stayed unusually cool in spots, down to minus one in the Jizera Mountains and Šumava, while central Prague held around 17°C.

Fire risk climbing: ČHMÚ is also flagging an increased risk of fires spreading given the current drought conditions, and afternoon showers or thunderstorms are possible from the northwest late Monday.

An estimated 45,000 people marched through Prague on Saturday for Prague Pride, with organizers and participants alike arguing that a shift hasn't kept pace with recent legal gains for LGBT+ Czechs in public attitudes. Same-sex adoption remains off the table even after last year's partnership reform, and this year's festival drew no government patronage for the first time in years.

Rights on paper, not in practice: festival director Kamila Fröhlichová pointed to continued online attacks and shrinking non-profit funding as evidence the legal "fix" hasn't translated into social standing, a gap several marchers echoed, saying they still feel like second-class citizens despite the 2025 Civil Code changes.

The Ministry of Health's proposal to open artificial insemination to women without partners is drawing formal objections from the ministries of labor and justice, with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs alone filing seven objections arguing the state shouldn't be in the business of "artificially" creating single mothers. Demand has nearly tripled over 15 years regardless; more than 5,000 children were born via assisted reproduction last year, the most on record.

Trans patients already locked out: the binary written into current fertility law goes further than this fight over single women, a trans man who becomes pregnant has no legal path to an abortion, since Czech law reserves that right for women, and clinics can require only a "man's" consent to use stored sperm or a "woman's" to use stored eggs, blocking some trans patients from using genetic material they banked before transitioning.

The average new-build apartment in the Czech Republic has lost roughly a full room's worth of space over the past decade, now averaging around 56 square meters, as developers lean harder into micro-units to keep price tags down. In Prague's Smíchov, roughly seventy of the roughly one hundred apartments in one upcoming building will be 25 square meters or smaller, while some units are shrinking to as little as nine square meters, technically sold as studios rather than apartments.

The price paradox: Smaller doesn't mean cheaper per square meter; some of Prague's smallest new units are running around 200,000 CZK/m², above the city's already-steep 188,000 CZK/m² average, as buyers get squeezed toward less space for more money.

Czech online retailers will be required to add a clearly visible "easy return" button to their checkout process, letting shoppers withdraw from a purchase as quickly as they made it, a rule stemming from an EU directive the Czech Republic missed the deadline to adopt, now expected to take effect in January.

Why it matters here: the Czech Republic already ranks near the top of the EU for online shopping share, so the delay has left international residents navigating returns without the standardized process shoppers elsewhere in the EU already have.

Prague drone school trains civilians. Ukrainian combat veterans are running a three-week FPV drone course on the outskirts of Prague, teaching both security forces and ordinary civilians, including a 51-year-old entrepreneur and a high schooler, to assemble, program, and fly the drones now central to the war next door.

Brno studio's Mafia sequel expansion coming Thursday. The Brno-based studio behind the Mafia franchise says Mafia: Homeland has sold up to 740,000 copies on Steam alone in its first year, prompting an Aug. 14 expansion, Man of Honor, that sends protagonist Enzo deeper into 1905 Sicily alongside a villain from the original 2002 game. The studio also built the first two Mafia titles.

Brno scientists build beer-brewing biobots. Researchers at CEITEC BUT have created magnetically controlled microrobots, part yeast, part magnetic nanoparticle, that stir fermenting beer on their own and can be pulled out with a magnet when the job's done, no filtration required.