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EU foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini, visited Prague on Monday for talks on some of the challenges facing the alliance in the present day, including migration, security and the fight against terrorism. The operative word at her meetings with the country’s top officials was “unity”.

Police have charged Adam Bartoš, right wing-journalist and head of a fringe nationalist party No to Brussels – National Democracy, and his colleague Ladislav Zemánek with hate speech. Last year, the two men visited the grave of Anežka Hrůzová, whose murder in 1899 triggered a massive anti-Semitic campaign, with a sign saying that the murder “united the Czech nation and showed the need to solve the Jewish Question, which has not been sufficiently dealt with to date”. The Jewish man accused of the murder, Leopold Hilsner, spent 19 years in prison without any direct evidence against him. The criminal complaint was filed by Michal Doležel, a councillor in Brno and member of the civic association Žít Brno.

In his interview for Czech Radio Plus on Monday, President Zeman criticized the government for failing to draw around 35 billion crowns in EU funds. He suggested the failure to draw the money was the result of laxness and incompetence. Originally, before corrective measures were taken, the country stood to lose up to one hundred billion. The president maintained that ‘even’ 35 billion crowns was an enormous amount. Over the period of 2007 to 2013, the Czech Republic had at its disposal the equivalent of 800 billion crowns from EU funds.

According to Czech President Miloš Zeman, the mass migration of refugees to Europe has been organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. In an interview for Czech Radio Plus on Monday, the head of state suggested that the Sunni Islamist organisation could not declare war, so it was trying to gain an upper hand through the migrant crisis. As in his recent Christmas address, the president referred to the influx of refugees as an “invasion”. Mr Zeman cited two sources as having apparently confirmed his view: Morocco’s foreign minister and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The former, he said, recently told him that the Muslim Brotherhood had ambitions of ruling not only the Muslim world but the entire globe.

The Interior Ministry is reported to have mismanaged public and EU funds to the tune of 390 million crowns. The Supreme Audit Office says it found irregularities in a number of projects aimed at establishing an advanced central system for electronic communication undertaken between 2008 and 2014. It also criticized the ministry for having avoided holding public tenders for several important contracts. According to the office 85 percent of the financing came from EU funds and the Czech Republic may have to return the money.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, is due to visit Prague on January 11 for talks with the Czech minister of foreign affairs, Lubomír Zaorálek. The Italian politician had been due to visit the Czech capital in November but the trip was cancelled, officially because of an injury to Mr. Zaorálek. However there was speculation that Ms. Mogherini had chosen to stay away because of statements by some Czech politicians, including President Miloš Zeman, concerning Islam and refugees.

The Czech government on Monday decided that no move would be made in 2016 to dump the Czech crown and adopt the euro. The Czech Republic currently meets nearly all the criteria for joining the euro zone apart from a minimum two year term in the ERM-2, in which the Czech crown would have a limited range to move against the euro. Monday’s decision still means that the earliest date for Czech adoption of the euro remains 2020.

Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka is attending the EU summit in Brussels not just for his country but also as the front man for the regional Visegrad Four grouping. But the Central European group has been showing some strains of late in reading from the same page.

The Czech government should refuse the requirement of the European Commission to label the goods from the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and the Golan Heights, the lower house of the Czech Parliment said in a resolution on Thursday. According to the Culture Minister Daniel Herman of the Social Denocratic Party, it was necessary to reject efforst leading to the discrimination against Israel. The EU does not recognise Israel's presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, and says the labelling policy aims to distinguish between goods produced inside the internationally accepted borders of Israel and those made outside.

Less than a fifth of Czechs would regret the collapse of the European Union, according to a survey by the Sociological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. About half of the respondents said would not care and 22 percent said they would be relieved, the survey suggests. Some six percent of those asked said they would actually welcome the EU’s collapse. Among those who would regret it were mostly younger, university-educated people from larger cities.