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New Year’s Day will be a real red letter day for many prisoners in the Czech Republic. Under a new criminal code being introduced on January 1 some crimes are being reclassified as misdemeanours – meaning those who are currently in jail on such charges will either be released or have their sentences reduced.

Tuesday was the last day on which jobless foreign workers could apply for assistance under the Czech Interior Ministry’s voluntary returns programme launched in February. Over the past eleven months the ministry was ready to assist some 4,000 foreigners but much fewer people than expected applied. Meanwhile, despite the economic crisis, the country has become one of the most attractive target destinations for immigrants.

The Czech caretaker government has moved quickly to shore itself up after being badly shaken last week by a vote in parliament which torpedoed its budget package for 2010. Prime Minister Jan Fischer has acted to put the budget back on its original tracks and clarify his support from the major parties which put him in power.

Nový Prostor, a magazine sold by the homeless, is celebrating ten years of its existence. It was first published in 1999, under the name Patron, and since then it has become well-established in the big cities. Now a bi-monthly, Nový Prostor sells around 15,000 copies each and has around 160 sellers all over the Czech Republic.

Earlier this year the Czech government ordered a large amount of swine flu vaccine fearing a large-scale epidemic in the fall. Now the vaccine doses are here, the epidemic is here, but there is not much interest in the vaccine – despite the fact that the people for whom it is intended are mostly high risk. As a third delivery of vaccine arrives, the Czech government is now considering making the vaccine available to anyone who wants it.

A Czech zoo is at the centre of what is probably the last chance to save an endangered African rhino. The species is believed to have become extinct in the wild. But the project to return four animals to their natural environment has created controversy.

A new EU regulation now makes it possible to use domains that contain diacritics- as long as they end in .eu. Demand in the Czech Republic, where a domain ending in .cz cannot contain diacritics, has been substantial- a day after the regulation came into effect, some 38,000 new domains were registered.

A recent discovery by Czech scientists promises to provide a cure for one of deadliest killers of the present day – AIDS. Working together with a team from the university in Heidelberg in Germany, they discovered a means which should prevent the HIV virus from spreading. Radio Prague talked to the head of the Czech research team, Pavlína Řezáčová, from the Czech Academy of Sciences, and asked her to explain the new finding and how soon it could be put into use.

The streets of Prague are currently packed with people going about their Christmas shopping. Many head for the nearest shopping mall, but those who want something special – a designer article – need no longer run from one boutique to another in search of just the right present. Young Czech designers who don’t have an outlet for their products have joined forces to open up a temporary arts and crafts “supermarket” in the centre of Prague. Earlier today I met up with Jan Plecháč, one of the organizers of the event, to find out what had led him and

It is well known that the Czech Republic’s Roma minority suffer from a wide variety of social problems, including relatively high levels of unemployment and low levels of educational attainment. Many say they are frequently the victims of discrimination – a claim that has now been borne out by a new European Union study. In fact, it found that Czech Roma suffer more discrimination than any other ethnic minority in the whole of the EU.