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Prague police arrested a 50-year-old man on Monday who shortly before held up a bank in the centre of the city. The man walked in and threatened to set off what he said was a bomb; when the cashier refused to give him money, the man ran away. Police detained the man only three minutes after he left the bank, and closed the whole street for some ten minutes before establishing the bomb was fake. If convicted, the man will face up to ten years in jail.

An “early warning center” that the United States are planning to build on Czech territory as part of a NATO missile defense system could be functional by mid-2011. Minister of Defense Alexandr Vondra said in a program on Czech Television on Sunday that the project will be partly financed by the government starting in 2012. Local soldiers will be operating the warning center after being trained by American forces. Mr Vondra added that while the Czech Republic had its own surveillance and defense systems for air space, they were not equipped to register activity in more remote locations such as the Middle East. The United States have earmarked 38 million Czech crowns or USD 2 million to be put into the construction of the “early warning center” in 2011 and 2012.

President Barack Obama last year announced the dropping of plans for an American anti-missile shield that would have included a radar base in the Czech Republic.

Sixty-five years ago on August 2, the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš published the Beneš decrees, one of the most important and most controversial chapters in Czech history. The Beneš decrees declared that German and Hungarian minorities living in Czechoslovakia were to be stripped of their Czechoslovak citizenship if they had acquired German or Hungarian citizenship. Historians believe that those decrees furnished the basis for the expulsion of some three million Germans and 80,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovak lands in the 1940s. After the Velvet Revolution, the Beneš decrees became a frequent topic of discussion in Czech-German and Czech-Austrian relations. In 1997, the Czech Republic and Germany signed the Czech-German declaration of mutual relations. Both countries apologized for the wrong they had done and pledged to respect each others’ legitimacy.

The general director of Czech Television, Jiří Janeček, has dismissed a recent critical statement by Prime Minister Petr Nečas. The prime minister said that the content of Czech Television’s two channels was too heavy on entertainment-oriented formats and did not fulfill the mission of a public television channel. Mr Janeček said on Sunday that following recent changes and restructuring of these channels, he had already been expecting criticism from all sides. He added that any television channel depends on its viewers and that it had to offer programming which they enjoy.