Czech Republic

The EU has already frozen non-farm payments to Agrofert — one of the largest Czech recipients of EU aid — and the Czech supreme state prosecutor is looking into whether criminal charges should be brought.

Brussels is likely to levy fines and demand that past aid is repaid, meaning that either the state or Agrofert would have to bear the cost.

An estimated 250,000 people rallied in Prague on Sunday to demand the resignation of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis in the country's largest protest since the fall of communism in 1989.

Four white lions, a rare cat species, made a home in an Istanbul thematic park after carried from the Czech Republic from Turkey.

"We're defending Czechia - hard and without compromise."

The billboards of the Czech Republic's ruling ANO party for this week's election for the European Parliament show that something has gone badly wrong with the country's relationship with the EU.

Babis' pragmatic - or hypocritical - approach to the EU looks likely to serve him well when Czechs vote May 24-25. Polls suggest his party will come first with about 25 per cent of the votes.

This result is all the more remarkable, given that this essentially one-man party has no real ideology, or content in terms of policies.

It is 15 years since the EU took in eight new European nations all formerly occupied by the Red Army and in effect colonies of the former Soviet imperium. Of all the enlargements of the European Community, now Union, since the first one in 1973 to take in Britain, Denmark and Ireland, the transformation of the eight central and east European states is without historical precedent.

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila stated on Friday that the Czech Republic ranks 10th in the ranking of foreign investors in Romania, with over 1,000 companies in the country, adding that, within her meeting with Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, she pleaded for "a substantial boost of the dialogue" between Romania and the Czech Republic at all levels.

Romania's Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Friday had a meeting with Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic Radek Vondracek to discuss boosting bilateral parliamentary dialogue, increasing investments and the Czech Republic supporting Romania's accession to the border-free Schengen area.

Greece is the fourth most expensive country in the European Union in terms of cellphone rates, with charges ranging from 4 percent to 272 percent above the bloc's average, depending on the service, a survey conducted in 2018 by Empirica for the European Commission has found.

Brnabic will visit the Czech Republic together with Minister of Finance Sinisa Mali at the invitation of Prime Minister Andrej Babis.

Brnabic will meet with President of the Czech Republic Milos Zeman and chairmen of both Houses of Parliament Radek Vondracek and Jaroslav Kubera.