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The Prague branch of the Czechoslovak Society for Sciences and Arts awarded their annual prizes for 2007 at the Senate on Thursday. Among those distinguished this year were Jan Sokol, professor of philosophy at Prague's Charles University and a former presidential candidate, and Tomas Halik, religious studies professor and a Catholic priest.

It has been three years this week since the Czech Republic joined the European Union. In terms of satisfaction with EU membership, latest opinion polls suggest that Czechs are more sceptical than the average EU citizen. But on the political front, two thirds of the population say they trust legislators in Brussels more than in the Czech Republic. I spoke to David Kral from the European policy think tank Europeum to find out how the country has fared in the last three years:

Just over a hundred days after taking office, the fate of the coalition government is in the hands of one man - a rebel MP from Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek's own Civic Democrats. Former finance minister Vlastimil Tlusty has challenged a package of tax and welfare reforms proposed by the government, and on Thursday put forward one of his own. The prime minister, who has staked the coalition's fate on the reform bill being passed, rejected the proposal. He said that while some of Mr. Tlusty's ideas were superb, they could not take precedence over

To mark the upcoming 62nd anniversary of the end of WWII next week, a convoy of historic American vehicles has set off this week on a ride across West Bohemia, a region which was liberated by US troops led by General George S. Patton. For the third time the "Liberty Road Convoy" will commemorate the role of the Allies in the liberation of Czechoslovakia from the Nazis - a fact largely ignored by the communist authorities before 1989. The historic vehicles left Prague on Wednesday and set off on a two-day journey to arrive in Pilsen in time for

Czech president Vaclav Klaus, an economist by profession, is preparing to do battle with environmentalists. In his latest book called "Our Planet is Blue - Not Green", which is to be released shortly, the president challenges the conclusions reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change namely that climate change is caused by human activity. The president on Wednesday presented his views to students at the Prague School of Economics, where he argued that environmentalists were not only misleading society - they were actually a threat

Seventeen years after the fall of the Communist regime, the Czech Republic will soon take a major step towards coming to terms with its past. After three hours of heated debate on Wednesday, the Chamber of Deputies approved a bill establishing an institute that will gather material and analyse the country's totalitarian history - from the Nazi occupation in 1939 to the end of the Communist era five decades later.

Just weeks after the opening of a Czech Embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul, Czech staff have been involved in a serious violent incident. When a car carrying the country's most senior diplomat in Kabul came under fire, Czech personnel had no option but to retaliate. The dramatic incident left two Czechs injured and three rebels dead.

Last week the US company Gilead Sciences announced that - in cooperation with the Prague Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry - it had developed a new drug that might prove to be a breakthrough in the fight against cancer. The drug - labeled GS9219 - has shown fantastic results in the first phase of testing on animals. We called the head of the Czech research team professor Zdenek Havlas to find out more about this revolutionary discovery.

The Bata Canal is a man-made waterway that runs through South Moravia. Surrounded by numerous historical sites and a beautiful landscape, tens of thousands of tourists take a ride down the canal every year. But this year, it is expected to attract many more visitors as, for the first time in over a decade, they are able to travel into neighbouring Slovakia without facing a fine.

Svatopluk Benes, one of the country's leading actors in the interwar years of the First Republic, has died at the age of 89. He was one of the last remaining legends of the silver screen in the brief time when Czech cinematography enjoyed a period of Hollywood glamour.