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Not only Czech football fans but fans of football from around the world will no doubt welcome news that Chelsea keeper Petr Cech's condition has reportedly improved following surgery in Oxford. At the weekend the star keeper underwent emergency surgery after suffering a skull fracture from a collision between Cech and Reading's Stephen Hunt in the English Premiership. Fans are wishing the keeper a speedy and full recovery.

One of the legends of the Czech underground, Ivan Martin Jirous (1944), has been awarded the 2006 Jaroslav Seifert Prize for literary achievement. The moment that many thought would never come was made official on Monday evening, when Ivan Jirous stood on stage inside Prague's St. Anne's church amongst a crowd of well-wishers and supporters, to accept official recognition for his poetry, and a recently published 500-page collection of his letters from prison.

Reports came from Sweden that a Czech air force's fighter jet seriously threatened another aircraft during a joint military exercise last week. The exercise nearly ended in tragedy, when a Czech pilot aimed at the wrong target using live ammunition, only narrowly missing another aircraft in the exercise.

After four months of futile negotiations, talks on forming a new Czech government are back to square one. President Klaus on Monday started a new round of talks with all parliamentary parties on the options that remain open.

When the former Social Democrat government introduced European Union food hygiene guidelines none protested more loudly than Czech pub owners. They said the strict new standards would bring them to bankruptcy and the ban on serving cooked food which was two days old interfered with the country's "traditions". The Civic Democratic Party - critical of what it called "the government's conformist attitude" towards EU rules and regulations - promised to change things when it came to power. It is now making good that promise. But will the government's

New figures released by the EU statistics office Eurostat this week show that the Czech Republic attracted 8.8 billion euros in foreign direct investment (FDI) last year. This is 5.2 billion euros more than two years previously and higher than foreign direct investment in any other new EU member state. Overall, the Czech Republic ranked eighth among the Union's 25 members.

Now what do you think about statements like these: "Mr XYZ is in a serious psychological condition" or "Mr So-and-So is psychotic? No, they were not uttered by doctors. Labels like these have recently become rather common on the Czech political scene, as politicians trade insults with great frequency. Now a group of Czech psychologists and psychiatrists is saying enough is enough. In an open letter to Czech politicians, they are calling on them to stop using psychiatric terms as insults in public discourse.

This weekend, book publishers, book writers, and book lovers will descend on the town of Havlickuv Brod, which lies about halfway between Prague and Brno. It's the sixteenth annual Fall Book Fair in Havlickuv Brod.

Among the special guests at Vaclav Havel's Forum 2000 conference earlier this week was the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. But he didn't leave the Czech capital straight after the event. On Wednesday Czechs got a rare chance to see one of the world's most famous religious leaders in the flesh, when the Dalai Lama made an appearance at Sparta Prague basketball stadium. Emily Udell met some of the thousands who turned out for this unusual event.

Three officials were arrested by the police's anti-corruption squad on Wednesday, charged with attempting to siphon off large amounts of money from EU structural funds. Two of the three are closely associated with the Social Democrats, and the scandal could damage the party at the forthcoming local and Senate elections.