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In the last few days the Czech tennis player Nicole Vaidisova has made a splash on the world stage for the first time. On Sunday the 17-year-old beat world number one Amelie Mauresmo at the French Open, in her first ever Grand Slam fourth round match. She has now reached the semi-finals after victory over Venus Williams on Tuesday. But what is her background? And what does the future hold for the latest Czech women's tennis sensation?

The Czech Republic's 23-man football squad have just left for Germany ahead of the biggest sporting event of the year, the World Cup. But while the team have qualified for the competition for the first time since the foundation of the Czech Republic, not a single Czech referee or assistant will be officiating in Germany. Dagmar Damkova is one of the country's leading referees - I asked her if it was harder for refs from small states to reach the top.

The leadership of the Civic Democrats, who came first in this past weekend's general elections, have launched official talks on forming a new coalition government. After party chairman Mirek Topolanek was entrusted by President Vaclav Klaus to lead the talks, he introduced his negotiating team, who are to hold talks with the Christian Democrats and the Green Party. Those three parties together have exactly 100 seats in the 200-seat lower house, so actually forming a government will not be straightforward, and could involve several votes of confidence.

In recent years there has been a surge in natural supplements for all manner of ills, including sexual problems. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry has made enormous strides in the development of prescription drugs for problems such as erectile dysfunction: the most famous being of course Viagra. But which are better, prescription drugs or natural supplements? That's the subject of a debate being held in Prague on Tuesday at a congress of the European Federation of Sexology.

The weekend's elections have produced a perfect split in parliament. If you look at a map of the election results, it also shows an almost perfect split in the way Czechs voted. Throughout Moravia, the eastern part of the country, more voted in favour of the left-leaning Social Democrats, while most of Bohemia, the western part of the Czech Republic cast more votes for the centre-right Civic Democrats.

The Czechs have gone to the polls: after eight years in government, the Social Democrats are to make room for the opposition right-of-centre Civic Democrats, with their sweeping promises of pro-market reforms and tax cuts. But that is not the end of the story. The Civic Democrats will only be able to form a majority government if they join forces with the Social Democrats. They have already rejected any form of cooperation with the Communists. The leaders of the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats so far rule out a Grand Coalition, leaving

Though the governing Social Democratic Party do appear to have come off second best in this year's elections, the party did win a greater percentage of the votes than most opinion polls suggested. So the deputy prime minister for the economy, Jiri Havel, isn't taking the result as that much of a defeat for his party.

As pre-election polls predicted, the Czech Green Party looks to have safely crossed the five percent barrier and made it into parliament for the first time since its establishment in 1990. Preliminary results show that the Greens could very well be key to establishing a coalition government. At Green Party headquarters on Saturday afternoon, Green Party leader, Martin Bursik, gave some reactions to his party's preliminary showing.

With all of the hullabaloo surrounding the opposing parties and their campaign promises, pledges and other jockeying for support from Czech voters, it's perhaps its easy to forget that free elections are a relatively young phenomenon here. Jiri Dienstbier knows this. He was a dissident under communist rule, during which time he published several underground newspapers and later spent three years in prison with his friend Vaclav Havel.

The Czech Communist party so far appears to have received a smaller percentage of votes cast than they did in the 2002 election - when they won nearly a fifth of the vote. Even so, they are still likely to come out of this year's elections as the country's third strongest party.