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We're now just a day away from the start of the Euro 2008 Football Championships in Austria and Switzerland. The Czech team will of course be there, and is in fact playing in the tournament's opening fixture on Saturday evening. I went and found out how Prague is gearing up to mark the events and found out what expectations people in the city have of their national side.

This week the Minister for Minorities and Human Rights Džamila Stehlíková announced the preliminary results of an ongoing study on difficulties faced by the Roma on the Czech labour market. Unemployment among many Roma remains high although the Czech average overall it is lower than the European Union’s. Czech officials hope they will be able to map out long-term solutions to help curb unemployment and to limit the number of drop-outs in schools in marginalised communities. They also hope to reinforce new skills to improve chances on the jobs

The Czech Republic has seen a massive increase in the number of shopping malls in recent years, with around 60 of them dotted around the country. Rare a decade ago, large shopping centres are now part of the everyday lives of millions of Czechs. And while the number of malls keeps on growing, some major retailers are also making inroads into the corner shop market.

Czech farmers have started pouring away thousands of litres of milk which could not be delivered to German diaries, picketed by local farmers protesting against low milk prices. In support of the protest, farmers across the country will also cut down milk supplies to Czech processing diaries by 10 percent.

When Mirek Topolánek’s centre-right coalition government came to power in January 2007, it held the slimmest majority – two seats - in parliament, and has survived pretty much on a knife-edge ever since. But this week it seems to have lost even that wafer-thin majority thanks to a rebellion in Mr Topolanek’s Civic Democratic Party over the restitution of church property. Now, newspaper commentators are predicting the government’s inevitable demise.

Plans to build a US radar base in the Czech Republic have been in the news lately, after a protest hunger strike undertaken by two members of a group called No to Bases. Jan Tamáš and Jan Bednář, who started eating solid food again on Monday, are now being replaced by various public figures on short symbolic fasts. Their influence has also spread outside the Czech Republic, inspiring Bruce Gagnon, an activist with the US-based Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space; Mr Gagnon has not eaten for a week and a half – on the phone

The Czech football squad are now at their base camp in the Austrian Tyrol, and looking forward to playing Switzerland in the Euro 2008 curtain raiser on Saturday evening. The Czechs experimented with line-up and formation in two successful warm-up games last week against Lithuania and Scotland, though it is still not clear whether they will play with two strikers or a five-man midfield. I spoke to goalkeeper Petr Čech before the team left Prague on Monday, and began by asking him what had been learned from last week’s friendlies.

The favoured Czech holiday destination par excellence is Croatia – with its miles of sandy beaches, beautiful coastal towns and exquisite Mediterranean cuisine. Well, actually, not many Czechs go for the cuisine - in fact a huge number of Czech tourists bring their own food with them. That obsessive self-catering seems to have irritated the Croatian authorities to such an extent that they’ve now banned tourists from bringing in meat and dairy products, to the fury of thrifty Czech visitors.

Amadeus, Mission: Impossible and Casino Royale are just a few of more than 70 international films shot in and around Prague since the 1980s. Visitors to the Czech capital now can follow in the steps of their favourite stars – with a newly published map that will show them where all the action took place.

Many fans of classical music in the Czech capital have been closely following the Prague Spring Festival drawing to a close this week. But how many knew that some of these classical musicians also play football? On Sunday members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra faced the Czech Radio Symphony in a 5-aside football friendly in Prague’s Hanspaulka district.