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There are 27 Czech political parties running in May’s general elections. Only few of them have a realistic prospect of entering the lower house of Parliament, but they all drew numbers on Thursday to put on their ballots. With the elections approaching, Czech expats around the world who want to cast their vote only have until this Saturday to register.

There is nothing like buying fresh produce on an open-air farmers’ market – but what may be common in other European cities has been missing in the Czech capital for years. Now things have finally changed. The very first farmers’ market was held in the district of Dejvice in March and immediately attracted some fifteen thousand people. On Saturday, the stalls opened for the second time.

A Czech online news server made the remarkable claim on Tuesday that as many as one out of two bottles of spirits sold in the Czech Republic is made on the black market, depriving the state of billions of crowns in unpaid taxes and putting public health at risk. Distillers themselves admit the problem is huge, although they put the figure at more like one bottle in five – still an alarming trend.

The Czech NGO People in Need have provided relief and development assistance to the people of war-stricken Afghanistan since 2001. Radio Prague’s reporter Christian Falvey is now in Afghanistan covering the work of the NGO and spoke to us earlier today about the situation on the ground.

Czech leaders and ordinary people are still in shock at the death of the Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and many of the country’s elite, when the government plane they were travelling in crashed. None of the 96 people on board survived the crash on the outskirts of the Russian city of Smolensk. Czech official reactions stressed sorrow at the depth of the tragedy in the neighbouring country with which Prague has strong and friendly ties. Chris Johnstone reports.

US President Barack Obama met leaders of 11 central and eastern European countries in Prague on Thursday. The meeting, held after the signing of a major nuclear weapons control treaty between the United States and Russia, dealt with these countries’ role in Afghanistan, and reassured the former Soviet satellites that by resetting its relations with Moscow, the United States would not curtail its interest in the region.

Dominik Duka, who was appointed the 36th Archbishop of Prague in mid-February, will be officially inaugurated as the head of the Czech Catholic Church at a solemn mass celebrated in St Vitus Cathedral on Saturday April 10.

All of the rubbish bins in Prague’s metro stations were removed for security reasons in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States. Now, over eight years later, they are slowly making a comeback, after Prague’s authorities decided to invest in high tech bomb-resistant bins for the city’s underground rail system.

The signing of the New Start Treaty in Prague has been hailed as the beginning of a new era in nuclear disarmament as well as US-Russian relations. But how fragile is the treaty – given that it must still be ratified in both the US Congress and the Russian Duma, and given other potential problems between Russia and the US?

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a landmark nuclear arms control deal in Prague on Thursday. The new START treaty, which took nearly a year to negotiate, will reduce the two countries’ nuclear arsenals by roughly 30 percent more than the previous deal. Both leaders also said they hoped the treaty would pave the way for further weapons cuts.