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Uncertainty over American plans to build an anti-missile system that would be part based in the Czech Republic has not been dispelled after a meeting between the Czech foreign minister and his US counterpart in Washington. America has, however, for the first time admitted the possibility that the project may not go ahead, with Hillary Clinton saying it now hinges on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The head of the Czech Catholic Church, Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, has joined criticism of Pope Benedict XVI over his decision to lift the excommunication of several bishops, including a notorious Holocaust denier. Meanwhile, a search has reportedly begun for his successor at the helm of Czech Catholics.

A year ago, Sabina Slonková acquired undercover footage of the president’s chief of staff, Jiří Weigl, meeting lobbyist Miroslav Šlouf in a downtown Prague hotel. Ms Slonková was recently fined 20,000 crowns by a Prague court for posting the footage on the news website Aktuálně while failing to disclose who had given her the tape. The fine that Ms Slonková paid for protecting her source was apparently the first of its kind since the Velvet Revolution, and on Tuesday the International Press Institute voiced its concern. Earlier, I spoke to director

A record number of jobs were lost around the Czech Republic in January, which saw the sharpest one-month rise in the unemployment rate in history. With 6.8 percent of the workforce now jobless, the government is trying to come up with new ideas to boost the economy and bring the decline on the labour market to a halt. However, experts warn the situation is only going to get worse.

With unemployment rising fast in the Czech Republic, it is often guest workers from states like Vietnam and Mongolia who are the first to be laid off – with redundancy meaning they immediately lose their legal status. Now the government has come out with a new scheme to give 2,000 unemployed foreigners a one-way ticket home, and a 500-euro payment.

One of the government’s suggestions for combating the economic crisis is to revive the so-called “Švarc system”. It’s named after Miroslav Švarc, a Czech building contractor who laid off all his employees in 1990 and immediately re-hired them on a self-employed basis, thus saving both him and them lots of money in tax and social and health insurance. The state later made the practice illegal, and Mr Švarc even spent a brief time in prison. However he was exonerated in 1995, and the Švarc system lives on – estate agents or plumbers, for example,

Recent days have seen increased uncertainty on the future of US missile defence plans in Europe, including the deployment of a radar base in the Czech Republic and interceptor rockets in Poland. Just last week some reported that the US might drop its plans entirely – in return for an nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia. But following a security conference in Germany, attended by US Vice President Joe Biden, it is clear the country is not giving up on missile defence yet.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy sparked anger in the Czech Republic last week when he suggested that French car companies currently based in this country should relocate to home ground. The Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, who currently heads the EU presidency, warned against using the global crisis to bring in various forms of protectionism and accused the French president of threatening the ratification of the Lisbon treaty by the Czech Parliament by pushing measures that go against the basic principles on which the EU operates. Earlier

Europe’s leading human rights body has urged the Czech Republic to stop surgically castrating sex offenders immediately. The Council of Europe has called the treatment ‘degrading’ and unnecessary. Czech doctors have come out in defence of the practice, which they call effective.

The lower house of Parliament on Thursday overturned a Senate veto on a bill that would outlaw publishing transcripts or broadcasting recordings of phone calls intercepted by the police without the consent of the person concerned. If the president signs the bill into law, journalists who violated the ban could face up to five years in prison or a fine of five million crowns.