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Social Democrat leader Jiří Paroubek, is flying to Moscow today along with several other key members of his party. On the agenda will be the proposed US missile defence system in central Europe, which both Russia and the Social Democrats oppose. But the Czech government is in favour of the country hosting a US radar base, and has accused the opposition Social Democrats of pursuing a potentially damaging alternative foreign policy.

For centuries, Czechs have been fermenting and distilling their own fruit brandies. They have been doing so despite the fact that it’s illegal and that they could face up to twelve months in prison for tax evasion. However, this may be about to change. The lower chamber has started debating an amendment to the penal code that could decriminalize home distilling.

On Tuesday, seven Czech artists who hacked into a Czech TV broadcast as an artistic prank last year were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing. In June 2007 members of the group known as Ztohoven tampered with Czech TV equipment in a piece aimed at showing the impact of the media. Members hacked into a live feed on Czech TV’s weather programme Panorama and in a flash superimposed a doctored image of a mushroom cloud rising on the horizon.

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has come out strongly against plans by the US to site a radar base in the Czech Republic – as part of a broader missile defense system in Europe. In an interview for public broadcaster Czech TV on Monday, the former Soviet leader questioned the system was being planned against rogue states like Iran, saying on the contrary it was aimed against Russia and China. His views contrasted those of former Czech president Václav Havel who appeared on the same show. He defended the project – calling it a “first chance”

Prague’s Divadlo na Zábradlí may be famous for staging former President Václav Havel’s plays, but over the next couple of months, it will be playing host to something rather different. ‘Láska je love, love is láska’ is a performance in two languages - about what happens when an American boy meets a Czech girl. The play is set to be performed for only the second time ever on Wednesday night, but in the run up to the show, I went along to find out more:

A number of towns in the Czech Republic are beginning to fight back against public drunkenness, adopting restrictions on the consumption of alcohol in public places. On Thursday the town of Mladá Boleslav joined a number of municipalities which had already taken steps, passing a new bylaw that will ban drinking in selected areas - from storefronts to school entrances to playgrounds.

The biggest pile-up in Czech history happened on Thursday after one of the country’s busiest motorways, the D1, was blocked by more than a hundred vehicles. They crashed due to heavy snowfall. The massive pile-up trapped around 20,000 people in their cars and rescue workers consider it a miracle that nobody was killed. Still, it took more than 12 hours to clear the motorway so that people could get home.

It has only been five months since Ottawa dropped visa requirements for Czechs, but since then Canada has seen a marked jump in asylum applications by Romanies from the Czech Republic. On Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported that more than 100 claims had been put forward since November and there is now concern a rise in applications could cross a key threshold in 2008. Under such circumstances, Canada might reassess its visa policy and reintroduce travel restrictions for Czechs.

The Czech artist Jaroslav Šerých is a man of many talents: painter, illustrator, printmaker and sculptor. To mark the great artist's 80th birthday, a retrospective of Šerých's work recently opened at Prague's Museum of Fine Arts. I went along to see the exhibition and meet the organiser.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the Czech Republic have been bombarded in recent weeks by fraudulent e-mails in what is the biggest attempted internet fraud scam in the country’s history. The emails purport to be from country’s biggest bank, Česká Spořitelna – and ask for client’s account and credit card details. The campaign has been so unrelenting that many Czechs have learned a new word, phishing the name given to this form of scam. I talked to Česká Spořitelna’s spokeswoman Klára Gajdušková and started by asking whether the bank has had