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One of the first people to vote as the polls opened in Prague on Friday afternoon was President Havel. In glorious spring sunshine, David Vaughan joined hordes of other journalists in a suburban primary school to wait for the presidential pair to turn up. He didn't have to wait long. At two fifteen Mr and Mrs Havel entered polling booth, and the camera shutters began to click.

Half the Czech government, as well as cultural figures and ambassadors from as far afield as Japan and Venezuela, attended a memorial ceremony and ecumenical mass on Saturday morning on the site of Lidice, the Czech village that the Nazis razed to the ground 60 years ago this week. On June 10th 1942, 173 men were shot and the women and children were transported to concentration camps. Of the children only seventeen survived. The only two Lidice men to survive were airmen who were fighting at the time in Britain's Royal Air Force. The English

The election results are out. The ruling Social Democratic Party has won, with 70 of the 200 seats in parliament and 30.20% of the vote. They are followed by Vaclav Klaus's Civic Democrats, with 24.47%, the party which had led in most opinion polls leading up to the election. Much to the surprise of many, the Communist Party has come a solid third, with over 18.51% of the vote, one of the big shocks of the election. The right-of-centre Coalition has won only 14.27% of votes, a disappointment for its members, but just enough to give the victorious

So the polls have closed on the second and final day of the general elections here in the Czech Republic. The official results are slowly coming in/the first official results are expected soon, but it will be some time before the outcome is known. In the meantime Radio Prague went to a polling station here in Prague 2, just one of thousands around the Czech Republic, and asked people on their way out how they had voted.

This year's general elections in the Czech Republic were historic - for the first time ever, Czechs living abroad had a chance to vote. According to unofficial estimates there are about 70,000 Czech citizens living abroad. However, the turnout was abysmally low. In European countries, the number of voters who cast their ballots at Czech embassies and consulates ranged from 70 in Poland to more than three hundred in Slovakia. The situation was similar in the United States, with some 300 hundred Czech citizens voting in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

Polling stations open at precisely two pm across the Czech Republic on Friday for voting in the country's two day general elections. The task involves choosing 200 deputies for the Lower House -from a total of 29 registered parties, the vast majority of them unlikely to get in. The future government and parliament is expected to face some challenging tasks - among them - leading the Czech Republic into the EU - possibly in 2004 - and also choosing a successor for President Vaclav Havel when his term in office ends at the end of this

Is the Czech Republic running out of small change? Here's a quick maths lesson: one Czech crown is worth around 3 US cents. Each crown is divided into 100 hellers, and the Czech National Bank issues 10,20 and 50 heller coins. But a 10 heller coin - worth about a third of a cent - is to all intents and purposes useless. And as Dita Asiedu reports now, more and more people are discarding them and shops are beginning to run out.

The elections which start here in the Czech Republic are historic - for the first time ever, Czechs living abroad have a chance to vote. However, the number of voters who registered at Czech embassies and consulates has fallen short of expectations - according to unofficial estimates there are about 70,000 Czech citizens living abroad but only around 2000 of them registered themselves as voters. The first to cast their ballots will be Czechs in the United States where the elections take place a day earlier to ensure the results would not

A new exhibition is underway in Prague's Municipal House, featuring works by the famous Czech Art Nouveau artist Alfons Mucha. Although Mucha has his own museum in Prague, the pictures exhibited in the Municipal House were borrowed from abroad and this is a unique opportunity for Czech art lovers to see them. Alena Skodova was at the opening ceremony and has this report:

As a NATO member, the Czech Republic needs balanced armed forces which would both fulfil the needs of the country itself and meet the requirements of the Alliance concerning its quality, inter-operability and deployment.