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Czech soldiers are serving across three continents but the fate of those missions has been up in the air since the opposition made a bargaining chip of them last winter. On Tuesday however the lower house of the Czech Parliament approved the deployment plan for 2010, prolonging the Czech presence in half a dozen countries to the relief of many.

Czech companies are complaining that they are already being hit by a credit crunch with banks reluctant to lend them money. Meanwhile, the Czech National Bank has warned that the situation could get even worse for firms and households trying to get loans or already heavily in debt.

On Friday, June 19th President Václav Klaus is due to celebrate his sixty-eighth birthday. Inside Prague Castle the celebration is likely to be dignified as befits a head of state. Outside the castle gates things are likely to be a little wilder. The president’s opponents and supporters plan it to have it out, right beneath the president’s windows.

The city of Prague has decided to drop its bid to host the 2020 summer Olympic Games. City officials said on Tuesday that under the current economic circumstances, City Hall wanted to focus on mitigating the effects of the crisis. Radio Prague spoke to Alexandr Kliment of the Czech Olympic Committee to find out how they feel about the decision.

Czech foreign minister Jan Kohout will finish chairing a two-day meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday. It is the last foreign ministers’ council with the Czechs in charge. With that in mind, just how far the Czechs have used the presidency to push their foreign policy objectives?

The East Bohemian town of Litomyšl has a lot to boast of, from its UNESCO World Heritage status to its lively year-round atmosphere. Nonetheless, what this town of 10,000 most frequently boasts of is that it is the birthplace of the composer Bedřich Smetana, and since 1949 it has been the home of a major music festival that bears his name. Now in its 60th year, Smetana's Litomyšl Festival continues to draw some of the biggest personages in classical music.

One and a half years after the Czech Republic’s entry into the border-free Schengen zone and its citizens are still falling victim to discriminatory police checks on the German side of the border, or so the Czech Interior Ministry insists. Now, the ministry is planning a system of retaliatory, tit-for-tat measures in a bid to make German police change their tack.

A rise in political extremism in the Czech Republic has been at the centre of media attention in recent weeks, and the past weekend was no exception. In the wake of the biggest ever police operation against the country’s ultra-right groups, far-right radicals took to the streets in a number of towns and cities to protest against the arrest of ten neo-Nazis.

The Romany language is dying out in the Czech Republic, but not as rapidly as some had feared, suggests a survey conducted by linguists at Prague’s Charles University. The results of the first study of its kind in this country suggest that around 30 percent of the Czech Republic’s Roma minority are fluent Romani speakers. Earlier today, I met one of the survey’s authors, Helena Sadílková, and asked her first whether the Romani spoken in the Czech Republic varied from that spoken elsewhere in Europe:

A new political party has emerged on the scene. The conservative TOP 09 party was unveiled in Prague on Thursday by one of its founders, the former Christian Democrat and finance minister, Miroslav Kalousek, and the party’s designated leader, Senator and former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg. In the early general elections scheduled for October, the new group will seek to offer an alternative to those dissatisfied with the state of Czech politics. Radio Prague talked to Karel Schwarzenberg, and asked him why he had agreed to lead the new