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On Thursday morning the Czech football team left Prague for the European Championships in Portugal, with fans around the country hoping they can win the tournament for the first time since 1976. Among the stars of the Czech team should be striker Milan Baros, who has scored a very impressive 16 goals in 25 international games - not bad for a 22-year-old. Before the Czech team left for Euro 2004, Ian Willoughby spoke to Milan Baros, and began by asking him how the Czech team's preparations for the tournament had gone.

The Czech atomic safety bureau, the SUJB, has said it will file a "diplomatic complaint" against the European Commission in protest of a surprise visit EU inspectors paid to the Temelin nuclear power plant on Wednesday.

The days when Czech-made Skoda cars used to be the butt of jokes are long behind us, and today Skoda is one of the most successful divisions of the Volkswagen Group. This was borne out this week at the Beijing Motor Show, as David Vaughan now reports.

The Czech Republic has been gripped by football fever ahead of Euro 2004, which gets underway in Portugal on Saturday. The only time the Czechs - or rather Czechoslovakia - won the European Championships was in 1976, when Antonin Panenka's famous chipped penalty entered football lore. Czech football fans have high hopes their team will do well in Portugal - but how does the great Antonin Panenka rate their chances?

Along with taking in the sunshine of Prague in the summertime, this week is an excellent opportunity to find out more about architecture. The first ever Archifest is taking place featuring the three cities of Prague, Brno and Litomysl. In a programme entitled "architecture: a public matter", Archifest offers numerous opportunities to hear architects themselves talking on-site about their own buildings and buildings they love.

Economic figures for May had been awaited in the Czech Republic with some apprehension. Not only was it the month when the country joined the European Union, but we also saw one of the most significant tax reforms in the last ten years, to bring value added tax rates in line with other EU countries. Given that we saw a rise in VAT for many goods and services - such as cigarettes or eating in restaurants - there were fears of a leap in overall consumer prices. But latest figures suggest that prices remained relatively stable, and that joining the

The Respect festival, which begins in Prague on Thursday, is probably the biggest world music event in the Czech Republic. Deirdre Bourke asked organiser Borek Holecek who were the biggest names on the bill, and how the Respect festival - now in its seventh year - had changed since it first began.

The Czech papers are full of the story: the shocking news that a two-year-old girl is fighting for her life after being run over by a drunken doctor in the grounds of a Prague hospital.

The Czech Republic has a rich tradition of archaeology both at home and abroad. Over the years Czechs have made numerous discoveries in Egypt, and there is currently a Czech team working in the important archeological area of the Pyramid Necropolis in Abusir, south-west of Cairo. So it is no surprise that last week Prague was host to a major international conference that brought together more than 80 Egyptologists from around the world. They addressed important questions of preserving Egypt's extraordinary archaeological and artistic legacy. Our

To the sound of local children playing traditional Czech folk music, a rather special exhibition of paintings was opened at the end of last week. Several hundred works by children from all over the world have gone on show in the unlikely setting of a small village in the countryside near Prague. But this village, Lidice, is different. Every year in June Lidice remembers one of the most horrific moments in the modern history of the Czech nation, when in 1942 - at the height of the German occupation - the Nazis wiped the village off the map. All