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The lower house of parliament failed on Tuesday to choose an Ombudsman for the Czech Republic. Although the post of Ombudsman is supposed to be apolitical, Parliament's failure to choose a candidate has been attributed to party politics. has the details:

Green City is the name of a project launched in Prague on Tuesday, whose main aim is to make the Czech capital a nicer place to live in. It's financed by the Philip Morris company, and I wasn't surprised when , whom we know is an ardent non-smoker, asked the company's spokesman Marek Hlavica. She then went on to ask the mayor of Prague, Jan Kasl, what he thinks.

Environmental activists arrived outside the Czech lower of house parliament on Tuesday to present a petition calling for a referendum on the now-complete Temelin nuclear power plant in South Bohemia. What began as a petition calling for Temelin to be shut down before it was even launched, has now become a campaign for a referendum on the issue. It has won the support of a small group of MPs, including Vladimir Mlynar from the Freedom Union and Social Democrat Petra Buzkova. spoke to Petr Stepanek, the spokesman of the Referendum 2000 coalition,

A group of Slovak Roma who entered the Czech Republic two weeks ago are on the move again--back to Slovakia. In recent months, nearly four hundred Slovak citizens have sought asylum in the Czech Republic, but some are now returning home. reports.

So the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, has overridden President Vaclav Havel's veto of controversial changes to the Czech electoral law. The new legislation, forced through parliament by the two largest parties, the main opposition Civic Democratic Party and the ruling Social Democrats, changes how the lower house is elected in a way that favours larger parties over small ones. The amendment has had many opponents, including President Havel. But their protests have been ignored by the two parties, and their last hope of blocking

In the course of the Second World War well over half a million Czechoslovak citizens were sent to German and Austrian cities as forced labour. They often worked and lived in appalling conditions in German factories, exacerbated by continual heavy Allied bombardment. Nearly sixty years later only one in ten are still alive and they are still awaiting compensation for their ordeal. Last week this came a step closer when the lower houses of both the German and Austrian parliaments approved the setting up of a fund to compensate forced labourers from throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And this Monday saw a further gesture of reconciliation, this time of a more symbolic kind, with a ceremony held in Berlin to remember 18 young Czech forced labourers who died in the city during an air raid in November 1943 - the same air raid that destroyed Berlin's famous Kaiser Wilhelm Church, to this day a symbol of the city's destruction. The ceremony was initiated by the German insurance company Allianz, which todays owns the building on the site where the young men died. Lydie Holinkova from the Czech Embassy in Berlin told Radio Prague's that the event was made particularly moving by those who attended the ceremony.

It's 55 years since the end of the Second World War, but in a number of cases the issue of punishment for war criminals remains unresolved. Few new cases have emerged in recent years, but now the spokesman of the leading Sudeten German organisation, the Landsmannschaft, has come up with a new angle, demanding that a Czech, Frantisek Foukal, be prosecuted for the massacre of German civilians after the war. has the story.

Beer is probably the oldest alcoholic drink in the world, and there's no doubt that here in the Czech Republic it's also the most popular. Average per capita beer consumption is about 160 litres per year, meaning that Czechs drink more beer than anyone on the planet. And after a hot summer day, for the majority of Czechs there's nothing better than a cool glass of beer in a shady pub garden. But while in other countries the price of a beer is well above the price of petrol, Czech beer remains extremely cheap. is here to explain why.

The oddities of British spelling and pronunciation were brought home to the Czechs over the weekend, when they learned that a place spelled Cholmondeley is actually pronounced 'Chumley'. They also improved their geography, when they learned the place so strangely named is situated in northern England, in Cheshire. History also had a part to play, because Cholmondeley was in the news this weekend as the place where, just 60 years ago, Czechoslovak military units were founded in Britain, units that would play an important role in fighting Nazi Germany