Current Affairs | All stories

Every year, for the last five years, the Khamoro festival has brought the vibrant culture of the Roma to the streets of Prague. It's a festival dominated of course by the exhilarating and heart-rending music of the Roma. But there's also a serious side to the festival, as Rob Cameron now reports.

This Saturday, Bahna u Strasic - between the cities of Prague and Pilsen - will be turned into a massive military training base to celebrate Ground Forces' Day. All day long, the public will enjoy presentations of various military operations and technology from Czech and also French, Polish, Austrian, and German forces. As Dita Asiedu reports, this family-oriented event is expected to attract thousands, being a one of a kind in Europe.

The president of the United Nations General Assembly and Social Democrat parliamentarian Jan Kavan is once again in hot water. Mr Kavan is rejecting calls that he should resign from his UN post because of a scandal involving classified documents at the Czech Foreign Ministry.

For the past 12 years Pavel Minarik has found himself in and out of Czech courtrooms. The former secret police agent's latest battle with the law ended this past Friday. What is he accused of? Why was he acquitted? Tracy Burns has the details.

Hundreds of visitors are expected to flock to Prague from all over the country this week to enjoy music, art and seminars about Roma life today. For the fifth time, the Khamoro festival features music groups from countries as near as neighbouring Germany and as far as Kazakhstan. Martina Pokutova is responsible for the Roma World Festival's public relations:

For the quiet village of Pysely, near Prague, the news must have come as a shock: police taking a 30 year-old local resident into custody, suspected of being the so-called 'cyanide blackmailer' He, it is believed, led authorities on a three-week chase, in an attempt to extort 300 million crowns. Those who were under threat: random patients at Prague hospitals the anonymous assailant had warned would be poisoned, unless his demands were met.

On Friday, a three-day conference on air pollution came to an end in Prague, organised by the European Commission. The conference was the conclusion of a series of joint projects with the candidate countries to study the air pollution related problems in the ten future member states. Dita Asiedu was at the conference and brings back this report:

This week over 120 representatives from EU member states and candidate countries met in Prague for a two day workshop co-organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the European Liaison Committee for Social Housing and the Czech Ministry for Regional Development. The main aim of the meeting was to hammer out a common definition of social housing and put it high on the political agenda - in view of the planned expansion of the EU. Hubert Van Eyck is vice president of the UNEC's Committee on Human Settlements:

Next year people in the Czech Republic will pay more to have their hair cut, to have their shoes repaired and to make a telephone call. These are just a few consequences of the biggest change in Czech taxation during the last ten years.

The Austrian city of Salzburg has never seen anything quite like it. This week presidents from no less than 17 Central and Eastern European countries converged on the city, bringing the ancient city centre to a complete standstill, much to the bemusement of locals and tourists alike. The presidents were continuing a tradition of meetings that began ten years ago in this same city on the initiative of Austrian President Thomas Klestil. As expected, the talks did not see anything new on the key questions of Europe's future, but as David Vaughan reports