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Three generations of Czechs have been raised on the adventures of Bobík, Myšpulín, Fifinka and Pinďa – the stars of the comic Čtyřlístek. This Friday, the now-cult comic celebrates its 40th birthday. I met the man behind one of the most swapped items in Czech playgrounds of yore:

The Czech National Bank has just issued a statement saying its banknotes may not be used for advertising purposes. That may seem obvious, so why spell it out? Well, because one Czech company is currently offering on its website “a unique way of promoting your company: ads on banknotes”. It’s a Czech invention, say Vedici, who are based in Pelhřimov, in the centre of the country.

Three weeks before Czechs go to the polls to vote in elections to the European Parliament, campaigning is in full swing. While the two strongest parties are engaged in destructive mudslinging, the campaign also features a new note – the Lisbon treaty.

Czech President Václav Klaus on Wednesday announced that he had no ambitions to chair a high-profile summit of EU leaders in June, proposing that the task should go to the country’s newly appointed interim Prime Minister Jan Fischer. The statement ended weeks of speculation that the Eurosceptic Czech head of state would use the gathering as a platform for his anti-reformist views.

The Czech Catholic Church has filed a complaint with the country’s Constitutional Court over a 2007 verdict by the Supreme Court according to which the state is the rightful owner of Prague’s famous St. Vitus Cathedral. The move is the latest round in a protracted legal battle between the Church and state over the famous Prague landmark.

Shock figures on the Czech jobs front in April have focused attention on how bad unemployment will become before it gets better. Most analysts are predicting worse to come. One major question is what will happen when temporary measures to cushion the blow - such as European scrap allowances – disappear.

Just over a month after the sacking of Petr Rada, František Straka has been appointed manager of the Czech international soccer squad. Straka has a reputation as an inspirational figure, though he has achieved little at club level. What’s more, his appointment is not definitive: he could be gone in a couple of months.

There was much rejoicing in Europe last week when Czech senators voted in favour of ratifying the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, which aims to streamline the way the EU is run with 27 members. But many senators from the centre-right Civic Democratic Party voted against the treaty, and on Tuesday several of them met President Václav Klaus, who also opposes the document – and who must sign the treaty into law for ratification to be complete.

One of the stranger projects dreamt up in modern Czechoslovakia has just come to light. According to a newspaper report on Tuesday, engineers in Prague created a plan to build an underground rail tunnel all the way to the Adriatic Coast – and to create an artificial island that would have belonged to Czechoslovakia.

The city of Prague has been at the forefront of classical music at least since Mozart uttered the famous words "Meine Prager verstehen mich" ("My Praguers understand me") and premiered his works here. The Czech metropolis continues to celebrate its lofty music heritage today with the annual Prague Spring festival, one of the largest and best known classical music festivals in Central Europe, which commences on Tuesday, as every year with a performance of Bedřich Smetana’s My Country.