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What are some of the problems that tourists encounter when they visit the Czech Republic? Well, the Czech Tourist Authority and other groups concerned with the Czech tourism industry have highlighted poor conditions at train stations, misleading advertising at bureaux de change and unqualified foreign tourist guides. And the Czech Tourist Authority's ultimate goal is to have all of these areas improved.

The Czech defence minister Jaroslav Tvrdik has announced a bold plan to speed up the reform of the country's armed forces. If approved by the government and parliament, it would give the Czech Republic a fully professional army two years earlier than expected.

On Tuesday the Czech government secured a crucial victory in a parliamentary confidence vote. The motion was called by the prime minister himself in an attempt to reassert the coalition's authority two weeks after it failed to unanimously support its joint candidate in Czech presidential elections. Not surprisingly this time the coalition held - it could hardly afford not to. With the slimmest of margins in the Lower House, and both opposition parties voting against, a single rebelling voice would have brought the government down.

Every day, Father Jan Lang leads a Czech mass in an upstairs room at the Velehrad religious, cultural and social centre on London's leafy Ladbroke Square. Velehrad has been a welcoming meeting place for young Czechs - and Slovaks - for many years and also serves as a hostel. Father Lang is in his 80s, and I asked him how long he'd been in London.

Four years ago today - on March 12 of 1999 - three former communist bloc countries, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, became fully fledged members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. For Czechs this was a landmark event that cemented the country's return to the free world.

Why did Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla call Tuesday's vote of confidence? His centre-left coalition enjoys a majority of just one vote in the lower house, so why risk bringing down his already fragile government? Rob Cameron joins me in the studio now - why was this vote called Rob?

There is a worldwide ban on commercial whaling but the whales still aren't safe. Two countries, Japan and Norway, continue to hunt whales for profit and they are pushing for whaling to be legalised again. Greenpeace wants to ensure the two countries do not succeed in lifting the ban on whaling through the votes of countries to which Japan has in turn offered more development aid. Currently on tour around Central Europe, Greenpeace are collecting signatures calling on the countries' governments to become members of the International Whaling Commission

In recent years the tenth of March has been increasingly marked in the Czech Republic as the day when a Tibetan uprising was crushed by the Chinese in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in 1959. Since the end of communism in 1989, many Czechs have marked the anniversary by expressing sympathy and support for Tibetan independence. City and town halls around the Czech Republic have also displayed the Tibetan flag on their buildings as part of a worldwide initiative called "Flag for Tibet". In 1996, when the "Flag for Tibet" initiative first started here,

Nineteen people were killed and 34 injured on Saturday evening when a coach filled with skiers returning from the Austrian Alps crashed near the southern town of Ceske Budejovice. Police are still searching for clues as to what caused the horrific accident, one of the worst in the country's history. Rob Cameron reports.

On Friday, former prime minister Vaclav Klaus officially became the second president of the Czech Republic. At the inauguration ceremony at Prague Castle, Mr Klaus took the presidential oath at a joint session of both houses of parliament.