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The club of modelers in the Moravian town of Vsetín goes back many years. Its members are exclusively men – in fact some of them claim that a woman would never have the patience to spend hundreds of hours gluing together tiny components in order to make a perfect replica of a plane, train or boat. Recently they had been producing and selling battery-powered airplane models that attracted kids from far and wide but they never dreamed that one day their hobby would lead them to make bigger and better things for Hollywood filmmakers.

It’s twenty years since a group of anti-communist dissidents took the brave decision to revive the newspaper Lidové Noviny, once the spiritual home of the Czech nation’s most eminent journalists and essayists. The dissidents were searching for a way of getting uncensored news and views to a wider audience. For two years, from January 1988 until December 1989, they distributed a monthly “samizdat” version of Lidové Noviny, until the paper was revived as a regular daily in January 1990. An archive of those samizdat editions has now been put

Poland’s new prime minister Donald Tusk arrived in Prague on Thursday for talks with his Czech counterpart Mirek Topolanek, and top of the agenda was the planned U.S. missile defence shield. Washington wants to build a launching pad for ten interceptor missiles in Poland, to work in tandem with an early warning radar system across the border in the Czech Republic. But Mr Tusk is not as fervently pro-American as his predecessor Jaroslaw Kacynski, and Prague and Warsaw are beginning to look slightly out of step on missile defence.

Barbora Škrlová, a 33-year old woman wanted by Czech authorities in connection with a brutal case of child-abuse in this country last year, has been extradited to the Czech Republic to face questioning. The public learned on Wednesday that the national was arrested by authorities after surfacing in Norway, where for months she got away with impersonating a 13-year old boy. It is the second time Ms Škrlová has gotten away with identity fraud, in a case that has shocked many in this country.

The audiobook is enjoying record popularity around Europe at the moment - sales are thought to be rising by 15% on average each year. The growth of the medium might be slightly slower in the Czech Republic than say, in neighbouring Germany, but both publishers and booksellers here are getting in on the action. And an increasing number of Czech household names are stepping up to read from the Czech literary canon.

An exhibition celebrating the history of the gay and lesbian movement in the Czech Republic has just opened here in Prague. It is mostly focused on gay culture in the last two decades, when Czech homosexuals have made great strides in achieving equality. When it comes to an end in the capital, the exhibition will tour the country.

The Czech Republic has outlined several foreign policy priorities for its EU presidency in 2009. Among those highlighted are the Union’s relations with the Balkan states. As Czechs see it, the EUs visa policy for the Balkans and other Eastern European countries should be softened, and if the Czech government's ambitious plan succeeds, the Czech EU presidency should also see Croatia a new member state of the European Union.

In exactly a month’s time, on February 8, Czech legislators will convene to elect a new president, with the incumbent Václav Klaus set to go head to head with Jan Švejnar. Mr Švejnar has spent most of his life in the United States and is little known in the country of his birth, something he hopes to rectify with a campaign which will take him to a number of regional centres. But it is in Parliament itself that Jan Švejnar really needs to win more backing.

Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek was on an official visit to Vienna on Monday to meet with Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer for a day of talks that included discussions on the Czech Republic’s Temelín nuclear power plant and the upcoming EU presidencies. But it was the recent enlargement of the EU’s Schengen zone that was arguably the most dominant. Since the relaxation of border controls last month Austria has seen a rapid new influx of illegal migrants and on Monday both Czech and Austrian representatives pledged that more would be done to

The Serbian province of Kosovo is expected to declare independence from Serbia early this year. The Czech foreign policy on this hot issue has been following the moderate attitude of the European Union calling for an agreement between the Serbian government and Kosovo’s Albanian majority. But the lower house of the Czech Parliament might push for a change in the Czech stance. An opposition MP wants a resolution passed denouncing a unilateral declaration of independence for Kosovo.