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Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise proposal during the G8 summit in the German resort of Heilegendamm on Thursday when he offered to his US counterpart George Bush to share a base to detect missile attacks. Mr Putin offered President Bush the joint use of a Russian radar station in Azerbaijan as an alternative to US plans to station parts of a missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, an idea fiercely criticised by Russia. Czech officials have so far adopted a 'wait and see' attitude to Moscow's proposal.

The Czech Republic has been enjoying record exports and new figures released this week show that the trend is far from over. In the first four months of this year, companies operating in the Czech Republic exported products worth 792 billion crowns (close to 37 billion USD). This is 117 billion crowns, or 17.4 percent, more than at the same time last year. The remarkable growth is mainly thanks to a revival of imports from the eurozone. But economic analysts say that neighbouring Slovakia, whose economy has been booming, is also playing an important

One of the guests at the 17th annual Prague Writers' Festival was the critically acclaimed American author E.L. Doctorow. A native of New York, Doctorow's books - including The Book of Daniel and Ragtime - are known for their blend of history and social criticism, and the writer made headlines in 2004 when he criticised the U.S. president George W. Bush.

One of the country's most notorious fugitives, billionaire Radovan Krejcir, has won another round in his cat-and-mouse game with the Czech authorities. On Monday evening he was unexpectedly released from a South African prison allegedly because the Czechs had failed to file an extradition request on time. Nobody knows where Krejcir is right now and the authorities in Prague and Johannesburg are arguing over whose fault it is.

The British Military and Advisory Training Team, or BMATT, has been operating in the Czech Republic since 2000. Based at the military academy near Vyskov in Moravia, it has trained more that a thousand officers from Central and Eastern Europe. Recently, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom signed a further agreement enabling any country affiliated with NATO to receive military training and assistance.

Kralovo Pole in Brno is dealing with a delicate matter at the moment. The district has a large memorial to Soviet soldiers who fell in April 1945 while liberating the city from Nazi rule and were buried there. The memorial displayed Soviet symbols - the five-pointed star and the hammer and sickle - ever since it was erected in 1946. The symbols were removed in the early 1990s, but now the star has returned.

The eyes of the world's media may have shifted a few hundred kilometres north to the G8 Summit in Germany, but the Prague conference at which George W. Bush made his keynote speech continued into its second day on Wednesday. The Democracy and Security conference, held at the Czech Foreign Ministry, brought together dissidents from all over the world, from Belarus to Iran. We've been speaking to one of the conference's main organisers, Natan Sharansky.

An exhibition in Prague has found an unusual way of countering the negative stereotype that members of the Roma community are often unemployed and live off state benefits. The exhibition of contemporary and forgotten Roma crafts highlights the fact that Roma on the Czech and Slovak lands made a living of hard manual labour.

George Bush has been all over the media in the Czech Republic since he arrived on Monday evening. However, many ordinary Czechs are perhaps talking less about his visit and more about a bizarre gift Czech Defence Minister Vlasta Parkanova was planning to give the US president - a CD supporting a planned US radar base on which the minister herself sings backing vocals.

This weekend, Central Bohemia was taken back to the fourteenth century as actors and politicians took part in a re-enactment of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV's traditional annual journey from Prague Castle to Karlstejn. The two-day procession was accompanied by various other events, introducing visitors to everyday life seven centuries ago. It was the first of an annual event launched by the governor of Central Bohemia, the aim of which is to help boost tourism in the region.