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The ruling Social Democrats have slipped further in the opinion polls despite replacing the prime minister, a poll by the CVVM agency showed on Thursday. The poll was conducted between April 18 and April 25, during which time former regional development minister Jiri Paroubek replaced Stanislav Gross as prime minister, amid allegations of unethical behaviour surrounding Mr Gross' personal finances and his wife's business dealings. The new CVVM poll puts the Social Democrats at 10.5 percent support compared with 14.5 percent support one month ago. The centre-right Civic Democrats retain a commanding lead of 31 percent support, while the largely unreformed Communist party polled at 16.5 percent. The Christian Democrats have the support of 8.5 percent of those polled, enough to cross the 5 percent threshold necessary for parliamentary representation.

Revellers from the north west of England could be given "codes of conduct" to stop them causing trouble in European cities, the Manchester Evening News reported. The move follows an explosion in binge-drink related disorder in continental stag-night hotspots like Prague, said the newspaper. Police in Prague say that 20 percent of all weekend crime in the Czech capital involves British men on stag nights. Czech tourism officials estimated there are 500,000 British "sex and booze" tourists each year, said the daily, and Manchester city councillors are now looking at ways of cracking down on troublemakers.

A Prague court has ruled that the Czech generic drugs maker Zentiva may resume distributing its anti-cholesterol drug, overturning an earlier ban imposed as part of a dispute with US drug giant Pfizer. The court had earlier banned the Czech company from distributing it's a-tor-vast-a-tin drug after complaints from Pfizer about its marketing campaign. Zentiva's drug is a generic version of Pfizer's Sortis, whose patent expired last month.

Social Democrat deputy Jan Kavan has said he is ready to support the new government of Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek in a May 13 confidence vote. Mr Kavan, a former Foreign Minister, was among five Social Democrat MPs who had threatened in recent days to vote against the new government. The group also included the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Vladimir Lastuvka, who, like Jan Kavan, has been calling for greater party influence in the sphere of foreign policy. A deal has been reached within the ruling coalition that will allow the party to choose who will fill the post of the first deputy foreign minister. With Mr Kavan on board, it now seems likely that the prime minister will have the support of all 70 Social Democrat MPs in the upcoming confidence vote.