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Fireworks will be going off around the world in just a few days' time. But here in the Czech Republic there are also fears of explosions of a very different kind. No, this time we're not talking about the war on terror, but bombs and other ammunition left over from the Second World War and the time of the communist regime. Old ammunition keeps turning up and is causing a good few headaches.

In today's edition: Radio Prague foreign language transmissions, the winner of November's competition. Listeners quoted: Wilson Cavalcanti, Brazil; Gina Cenkl, United States; Helmut Matt, Germany; Jonathan Murphy, Ireland; Qiu Lei, China; D. M. Cook, Scotland; Kendra Anspaugh, United States.

The Czech Republic has donated 53,000 pounds sterling to the construction of a monument dedicated to the Royal Air Force pilots who flew during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Of the 2,936 pilots from fifteen countries, eighty-nine were from Czechoslovakia. The Battle of Britain Monument will be unveiled in London some time next year and the project is expected to cost 1.6 million pounds.

Seventy prominent German intellectuals, writers and politicians, including the chairman of the federal parliament have signed an open letter to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, very publicly renouncing claims to any property in the neighbouring countries of Central Europe. All the signatories have one thing in common. They, or their parents, originally came from what is now the territory of Poland or the Czech Republic, but were expelled after the Second World War. Millions of ethnic Germans were forced to move westwards, as the map of Europe

This Sunday marks the 60th anniversary of the "Slovak National Uprising," the anti-fascist military action that began on August 29, 1944. In its simplest telling, the uprising was the culmination of years of planning by Slovak partisans, 18,000 of whom fought alongside 60,000 Czechoslovak soldiers against the Nazis and the nominally independent state of Slovakia led by President Jozef Tiso. But as Brian Kenety reports, the politics behind the uprising are far more complex.

The British journalist and author Neal Ascherson is widely regarded as one of the UK's leading experts on central and eastern Europe, and has experienced some of the key moments in the region's recent history at first hand. When he visited Prague recently, I asked Neal Ascherson where his interest in this part of the world had come from.

Czechoslovak participation in the first weeks of "Operation Overlord" — the invasion of Normandy — was almost exclusively limited to the air, as soldiers from occupied Czechoslovakia's 1st Armoured Brigade did not deploy to France until several weeks after the Allied landing's first wave. But hundreds more Czech fighting men took part in the D-Day landings doing battle under the flags of other Allied nations. Brian Kenety reports.

Czech veterans of the Second World War who fought alongside the British and who now make their home in the U.K. were flown by special military transport on Tuesday to Prague, ahead of celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Brian Kenety was on the tarmac to meet them and has this report.

Perhaps no figure in modern Czech history is as controversial as Edvard Benes. He was the second president of Czechoslovakia: twice he had to give way to hostile forces while in power and he is also often criticised for signing the decrees that resulted in 2.5 million Germans being deported from the Czech lands after the Second World War. To mark the 120th anniversary of his birth a special seminar has been held in Prague to redefine his legacy.

"Voices of Heroes", a unique oral history project, seeks to honour the aging men and women who left occupied Czechoslovakia to serve in foreign armies during teh Second World War. Brian Kenety reports.