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Clean-up operations are underway in the southern and eastern parts of the Czech Republic where 62 towns and villages were hit by heavy floods in the past few days. Although water levels are now receding around the country, the danger is far from over with meteorologists predicting more heavy rain into the week.

In June 1989, a group of people around the dissident and future president, Václav Havel, put together a petition to the communist authorities asking them to stop oppressing freedom in the country. Over five months, more than 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks signed the Několik vět petition, fuelling the demise of communism in Czechoslovakia.

There are many festivals in and around Prague celebrating all the wonderful facets of this city imaginable. But until this weekend, there was never a festival that feted the city itself. Now the “Oslavy Prahy”, or Celebrations of Prague, festival is going to do just that. The three-day festival aims to turn Prague into what its organisers describe as “a paradise of music, film, theatre, art, sport, science, fashion, adrenalin and dance.”

Prague is a hosting a five-day international conference on the return of looted WWII Jewish property. The conference has been billed as a last chance to clear obstacles that have prevented restitution to some of the remaining Holocaust survivors.

The clean-up operations have begun in northern Moravia following the region’s worst flooding in over a decade, in which 11 lives were lost. Hundreds of families were evacuated from their homes while thousands in the region remain without gas and electricity. On Thursday, Prime Minister Jan Fischer pledged millions of crowns, and 1,000 soldiers, to help pick up the pieces in the areas worst affected. Earlier today, I spoke to Czech Radio’s Igor Horváth in Ostrava, I asked him first about how the situation had developed there overnight:

Flash floods swept across the north of the Czech Republic on Wednesday night, claiming at least 10 lives, washing away homes and severely disrupting transport. On Thursday, Prime Minister Jan Fischer called a meeting of the state security council, which pledged to deploy 1,000 soldiers to the areas worst affected, and millions of crowns in emergency aid.

A worldwide grab for land is underway by rich and populous countries like Saudi Arabia and China. In the Czech Republic, agricultural land is also being snapped up. Whereas buyers used to be mainly Dutch and German farmers, now Western investment companies are also getting in on the act.

The American centre in Prague hosted a roundtable discussion on Wednesday on the growing threat of extremism, at a time when far-right groups are holding regular rallies in Czech towns and several Romany families have been attacked by neo-Nazis. The discussion was attended by government ministers, Romani rights activists and also groups that monitor far-right extremism. Klára Kalibová is from the monitoring group Tolerance.

The Lisbon treaty, a reform document which should reshape the working of the European Union, has to date been ratified by all but four countries of the 27-member block – Ireland, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. Now the Czech president, Václav Klaus, has said he will not make up his mind on whether to ratify the document until all other EU states have reached a decision.

As we spend more and more of our lives online, we’re exposing ourselves to the more nefarious aspects of the internet – spam, viruses, phishing, extremist websites, even cyber warfare. How to fight such threats is no longer the domain of computer geeks – governments around the world have whole departments to tackle the issue. The problem of cyber terrorism and cyber crime is being discussed this week at the Cyter 2009 conference in Prague, as part of the Czech EU Presidency.