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Czechs were shocked on Sunday night to hear of the death of Karel Svoboda, one of the country's most popular songwriters. Svoboda - who had written hundreds of hits and film scores - was found dead in the garden of his villa outside Prague. A police investigation into his death suggests he took his own life.

This week the United States officially petitioned the Czech Republic for authorization to operate a radar base about 35 kilometers southwest of Prague. Today the American ambassador, William Graber, is meeting with mayors from the communities in the vicinity of the planned installation. It's the first chance the local authorities have had to ask the Americans about their plans.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a brief visit to the Czech Republic on Friday to discuss the future of the EU constitution and other issues with Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek and president Vaclav Klaus. The German Chancellor's visit also coincided with the tenth anniversary of the so-called Czech-German Declaration. This document was signed in Prague ten years ago this week and was drafted to help lay the foundation for modern German-Czech relations.

Every year new meteorites are found on different parts of planet Earth. They travel for millions of years and it is usually impossible to say where they came from - but in just one case Czech geologists think they know - North-East Africa 003 is believed to have originally come from the Sea of Rains on the moon.

Everyone knows the basic ingredients of pizza are dough, tomato sauce, and mozzarella cheese. But a new study has found that much of the pizza being served in the Czech Republic is made with so-called "fake cheeses", that aren't really cheese at all. Ilya Marritz has more.

Medecins Sans Frontieres the Nobel-prize-winning humanitarian relief organisation has just opened an office in Prague, a move it hopes will see an upsurge in the number of skilled Czech and Slovak volunteers it can recruit for its missions.

Just two weeks after it was appointed- and a mere five days after winning a confidence vote in the lower house of Parliament - the country's new centre-right government has run into serious problems. On Wednesday Culture Minister Helena Trestikova unexpectedly resigned and Regional Development Minister Jiri Cunek may be stripped of his immunity on suspicion of having accepted a bribe.

When a Czech-American group handed over a valuable piece of Manhattan real estate to the Czech Government in the year 2001, it was expected that the building would be fully renovated by 2004. Six years on, construction work on the city's Bohemian National Hall or "Narodni Dum" is still incomplete. This week, a representative of the New York Czech community is in the Czech capital to confer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ilya Marritz has more.

With a new government finally in office, the focus has shifted from the country's political crisis to key foreign policy issues. In the coming months the Czech leadership will have to decide about hosting a US radar-base on its territory, consolidate its stand with regard to the EU constitution and start preparing for the country's EU presidency in 2009. The government's foreign policy team is now bigger than ever and on Tuesday President Klaus invited three government ministers to Prague Castle for some foreign-policy fine tuning.

One of the country's biggest manufacturers of kitchenware is recording millions of crowns in losses. The Italian authorities have banned the sale of a number of thermal containers made by the Czech brand Tescoma, saying the flasks are carcinogenic. Dita Asiedu reports: