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Maternity hospitals around the Czech Republic are bursting at the seams. The annual birth rate in the Czech Republic has been slowly increasing over the last five years, but recent weeks have seen an unusually high number of births.

Four years ago Czech photojournalist Michal Novotny took a photo that may have given one Afghan - a boy named Ajamal - a fighting chance for a better life. The picture showed the boy - who was then seven - lying in a hospital bed, slowly succumbing to blindness due to malnutrition. When the picture was published in the Czech papers, a Czech reader, Marta Nollova, was so moved that she decided to find a way of helping the boy. This was the catalyst in a chain of events, which eventually led to Czech charity workers in Afghanistan helping to find

President Vaclav Klaus is in hot water again after controversial comments about multiculturalism and terrorism. Mr Klaus was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that there was a link between the mass influx of foreign cultures and terrorist attacks on the West.

The renowned Czech spa town of Marianske Lazne, traditionally known as Marienbad, was on its feet on Monday morning, awaiting the arrival of a British Royal. Prince Edward, the Queen's youngest son, is paying his very first visit to the Czech Republic and he headed straight for Marianske Lazne.

Tourism is one of the Czech Republic's biggest industries, with around six million people visiting the country every year from all over the world. In order to maintain - and even expand - tourism in this country, the Association of Czech Travel Agencies has teamed up with the Local Development Ministry and CzechTourism. Their approach: to improve services, and persuade visitors to both stay longer and get out of Prague and visit the regions.

The war of words between President Vaclav Klaus and Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek over the latter's proposal to compensate Sudeten German antifascists has reached a new high. On Thursday President Klaus said that Mr Paroubek "must have taken leave of his senses". The president was reacting to PM Paroubek's statement that he had probably misunderstood the essence of the reconciliation gesture and that by having rejected it President Klaus has got into one group together with the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft in Austria.

Almost sixteen years after the fall of communism the Czech Republic has still not resolved the much-debated issue of controlled rents - a legacy of the state-controlled economy which is distorting prices on the housing market. The government has finally decided to address this sensitive issue and approved a bill proposing an average 9-percent increase of controlled rents over the next six years.

The Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek's plan for a reconciliation gesture towards Sudeten Germans who were expelled from the country after WWII despite the fact that they had actively opposed the Nazi regime has run into serious problems. Even before the prime minister had time to specify what kind of conciliatory gesture he had in mind, the opposition parties and president Klaus slammed the idea as "totally irresponsible and potentially dangerous". In addition to that the Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda has now made it clear that his country

After the rejection of the European constitution by the public in France and the Netherlands the last EU summit criticized the general lack of information on European issues in most of the EU member states. In response to that criticism, the Czech government has now decided to change the framework of its planned EU informational campaign. Instead of focusing solely on the EU Constitution, it aims for a broader scope, explaining how the European Union works and how the Czech Republic may benefit from EU membership. Martin Mikule called Petra Masinova

This Sunday, people will jump into rivers all over Europe to reclaim their environment and demonstrate their wish to have clean and living rivers again. But how clean are Czech rivers? Ten years ago, no Czech would have dreamed of swimming in the rivers, mainly polluted by industrial waste.