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Russia’s deputy Prime Minister arrived in Prague for talks on Monday amid frosty Czech-Russian relations following a tit-for-tat spy row. Speculation has been high in the Czech capital about what concrete steps Alexander Zhukov might take to ease the current strains. But is the anticipation about a possible diplomatic thaw is well founded?

The Chinese Embassy has protested at speeches given by the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and the exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer at a human rights conference in Prague. The “Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Asia” conference, organised by Václav Havel’s Forum 2000 Foundation, got underway on Friday with a panel discussion on religious, cultural and indigenous rights.

The Czech Constitutional Court upheld a complaint by an independent MP on Thursday, cancelling the holding of early general elections planned for early October. The court said that the constitutional amendment which shortened the current term of the Chamber of Deputies was itself a breach of the constitution. Legislators have reacted quickly – saying they will amend the constitution to allow the holding of early elections in November.

Finding an agent that would successfully clean up chemical toxins has been a kind of theoretical Holy Grail for chemists. Thanks to a group of scientists at Brno’s Masaryk University it seems the quest is over. The international team has created an enzyme that breaks some of the most persistent chemical waste products down into pure water and carbon dioxide, doing in a few months what takes nature hundreds of years. A bit earlier I spoke with Dr. Jiří Damborský, who headed the team.

The Czech government has just approved a draft budget for 2010 that includes a record deficit of 230 billion crowns, or more than 13 billion USD. The caretaker cabinet has also been debating measures that could save around 70 billion crowns. But, with elections set for later this year, the main Czech parties have shown little enthusiasm for the government’s proposals.

Czech crayfish are in trouble, and a new multimillion-crown research centre is coming to their rescue. The project aims to reduce the threat of rival crayfish species brought here from America and restore the indigenous population, while at the same time being of practical benefit to the water system.

A “hi-tech living room” for students is how the director of the National Technical Library described the institution’s new building, which was officially opened in Prague on Wednesday. The new library was completed after more than 14 years in the middle of a university campus in the Czech capital. But the modern National Technical Library has more to it that just state-of-the-art technology.

The Czech Republic and the Principality of Liechtenstein established diplomatic relations on Tuesday, marking an important step forward in a decades-old property dispute. The two countries have had no official ties since World War II, when Czechoslovakia seized land and castles belonging to the aristocratic House of Liechtenstein.

Originally the concept of one Czech man, Ivan Mečl, Divus has grown into something of a mini art empire. The organization has offices in Prague, London and Berlin, and a magazine called Umělec published in Czech, Spanish, English and Chinese. I paid a visit to two of the organisation’s offices:

As Radio Prague reported earlier this year plans are well underway to restore a statue of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in front of Prague’s main station that was torn down by the Nazis in 1941. On Monday, however, an important milestone in that project – the raising of a polystyrene model on a crane – didn’t go quite to plan, as rival sculptors ended up throwing punches.