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Two years ago at the NATO Summit in Prague the process was set in motion - it is now just about ready to come full circle: on April 2nd NATO will officially expand by seven new countries as Jan Velinger reports.

Regular listeners will know this is the Year of Czech Music. One of the highlights of the year will be celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of perhaps the most famous Czech composer of all, Antonin Dvorak. The anniversary falls on May 1, though events are already taking place, among them the Dvorak Nelahozeves Festival, which got underway recently. David Vaughan spoke to Jakub Puchalsky from Unilever, one of the sponsors of the festival, and asked him why it was being held in the small town of Nelahozeves, just north of

Have you been living with the same person for twenty years? Do you have a teenager at home? Then you have the ability to tackle life's most difficult challenges and managing a computer will be an easy task for you. That according to an advertisement from the Ministry for Information Technology, drawing people's attention to the latest round of courses within the National Programme for Computer Literacy.

This year's Prague Writers' Festival, which has now come and gone, but left a lot to be thankful for and a lot to remember. Not least was a meeting of poets Miloslav Topinka and Zbigniew Machej on Theatre Minor's stage for a reading of their work last Wednesday.

One of the most modern sports arenas in the world was ceremoniously declared open in Prague on Saturday. Some twelve thousand guests turned out to watch President Vaclav Klaus cut the ribbon on the state-of-the-art Sazka Arena, which will host the forthcoming ice-hockey world championships. But there were some notable absences from Saturday's ceremony - members of the cabinet. Rob Cameron reports.

Of all the authors' participating in this years' Prague Writers' Festival, none seems like a more apt choice than Gary Shteyngart. His award-winning first novel - The Russian Debutante's Handbook - is actually set in Prague during the early 1990s. The novel has received much praise for the sharp, satirical manner in which it portrays the notorious American expatriate scene that existed in the city back then. We met up with him while he was here to talk about his comic portrayal of this particular period in Prague's recent history.

European Union leaders are gathering in Brussels for a summit dominated by three main issues: turning the EU into the world's most competitive economy, restarting the stalled talks on a European Constitution, and the fight against terrorism. Leaders of the 10 countries which join the EU on May 1st - the Czech Republic among them - are also attending the talks. Radio Prague's Alexis Rosenzweig is in Brussels; we spoke to him earlier.

This week the 14th annual Prague Writers' Festival has been underway in Prague and Jan Velinger has been attending afternoon discussions and the so-called "International Evenings". On Wednesday the evening programme welcomed Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, German-born English poet Michael Hofmann, and English writer Robert Irwin. As Jan Velinger now reports this was the unforgettable night that visitors had been waiting for.

Newspapers around the world on Thursday carried photographs of people grieving at a service in the Spanish capital Madrid for the victims of a terrorist attack there two weeks ago. The state memorial service was attended by several European leaders, among them the Czech prime minister, Vladimir Spidla, who told Radio Prague why he had gone to Madrid.

This year's Prague Writers Festival - the 14th since its inception - is now underway in the Czech capital, this year bringing yet another group of world-class authors to Prague. Authors including South African Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer, German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Russian-born American author Gary Shteyngart, to name just a few. Czechs are of course also represented by several authors, including former dissident Eda Kriseova - the author of a biography on Vaclav Havel.