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The Czech national team is well placed at the halfway stage of the qualification campaign for the European women's football championship, which is to be held in England in 2005. The Czechs lie in second place in their group and have a very good chance of winning at least a place in the play-offs. The success of the national team reflects the improving situation in this country for a sport that is growing in popularity. Earlier this month, the Czech Football Association held a press conference aimed at raising awareness of the development of women's

As Prague develops into one Central Europe's main commercial capitals, there are literally hundreds of new building sites in the city, to feed a seemingly unlimited demand for new office and retail space. On many of these building sites you will only rarely hear Czech, as a huge percentage of the workers are migrants from Western Ukraine. There are 100 000 Ukrainian nationals currently thought to be working in the Czech Republic, around half of them without work permits; that's in total about one percent of the Czech population. These migrant workers

The Czech Republic was among the first countries to join the international rescue effort underway in the Iranian city of Bam, devastated by Friday's earthquake. Some 22,000 people are known to have died in the disaster, though the final death toll could be much higher. The Czech authorities have sent a 14-man rescue team with sniffer dogs to the area, as well as four tons of humanitarian aid. Rob Cameron has the story.

Some of you might remember a programme a few months back about a very unusual composer called Vaclav Halek, who has composed more than 2,000 pieces of music based on the "song" of the wild mushroom. Well Mr Halek also composes and arranges Christmas carols, and not just Czech carols, but Christmas music from all over the world. Rob Cameron went to meet him.

Welcome to Radio Prague's Christmas Eve special, with a feast of Czech Christmas music. We'll be hearing some traditional Czech carols and meeting some of the people singing them, members of the Punkva Choir, from the Pripotocni Secondary School here in the heart of Prague. The choir is unusual for a school choir in that it recently recorded its very own CD, as part of an international schools project. The choirmaster and four members of the choir have joined me in the studio to talk about Punkva and the carols they sing. We'll be hearing some

Pavel Nedved, the Czech international football captain, has won perhaps the most prestigious award in his sport, the magazine France Football's Golden Ball for European Player of the Year. Nedved, who plays for the Italian club Juventus, won the poll of sports journalists from around the continent by some margin, and his win has generated great excitement here in the Czech Republic.

Visitors to Prague may notice that - unlike many other major cities - you very rarely see a stray dog on the streets here. Perhaps this is partly down to the fact that Czechs - as a nation of dog-lovers - are loath to leave an abandoned dog to fend for itself against the elements. Cats, unfortunately, don't seem to occupy the same special place in Czech hearts, and the number of stray felines roaming Prague's streets remains a persistent problem. The Prague Society for the Protection of Animals is one organisation tackling this issue. It runs a

For the past year now, the authorities have been running a scheme to lure skilled foreign workers to the Czech Republic as the country's population ages and people go abroad to work. The scheme is still in the trial stages, open to applicants from just three countries - Bulgaria, Croatia, and Kazakhstan. Under the scheme, potential immigrants are given fast-track access to residence permits, allowing them to settle permanently in this country after just two and a half years instead of the usual ten. One of them is Mladin Barbalic, a 40-year-old civil engineer from Croatia who came to Prague in 1994. Kay Grigar spoke to him.

Many Radio Prague listeners will be familiar with the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, the British man in Prague who managed to save 669 Jewish children at the beginning of the Nazi occupation in 1939, by getting them visas to Britain. For nearly 50 years, Sir Nicholas - now 94 - told no-one about what he'd done, not even his own wife. When the story finally emerged, it was made into an award-winning film called "The Power of Good". A DVD of the film has just been released for schools, containing more than an hour of extra material which could help

In the early hours of Monday morning, the last fifty personnel from the Czech military field hospital in the Iraqi city of Basra arrived in Prague - putting an end to the hospital's nine-month mission in the war-torn country. The Czech government decided to terminate its mission last month despite protests from many quarters including the Czech ambassador to Kuwait, who was later sacked over the remarks. The withrawal of the field hospital, however, isn't the end of Czech military involvement in Iraq.