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On Wednesday the presidents of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary held a Visegrad summit in the east Bohemia town of Castolovice. Of the Visegrad four, which also includes Slovakia, only the Slovak president Rudolf Schuster was absent, due to illness.

Now that clean-up and reconstruction operations are well underway in the capital Prague local entrepreneurs have been thinking of ways to help raise money for the victims of the floods. One interesting up-coming event is a benefit concert to be held at a Prague bowling bar this Friday - the benefit is being put together by organisers from prague.tv, - no, not a local television station in spite of the name - an English-language web site created by two Americans and an Englishman based in the Czech capital. Their site acts as an information board

August 21st is the anniversary of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, without question one of the bleakest days in the country's history. The invasion marked the end of the tentative reforms of the Prague Spring - which had given hope to so many - and the beginning of many years of stultifying repression by the Communist regime.

Germany sent its Environment Minister Juergen Trittin to the Czech Republic on Tuesday, to examine claims that toxic dioxins and mercury were leaking into the River Elbe from the flooded Spolana chemical plant. Mr Trittin joined his Czech counterpart Libor Ambrozek for a tour of Spolana, and afterwards the two men told reporters that mercury and dioxin levels in the flooded factory were no higher now than before the floods, suggesting that fears of an environmental catastrophe were unfounded. But environmental groups such as Greenpeace say

As the country struggles to deal with the damage caused by last week's devastating floods, people face plenty of secondary problems. Telecommunications and transport remain crippled. Getting through to anyone on the phone is a major challenge, getting somewhere in person even more so.

A 12-year-old seal named Gaston made international headlines when he escaped from Prague zoo during last week's floods, swimming around 120 kilometres in five days, before being recaptured north of Dresden in Germany. Unfortunately, the seal died on Tuesday while being transported back to Prague, evidently from shock and exhaustion; his death was sadly typical of the misfortune which has befallen Prague zoo over the last week. Ian Willoughby has more.

The Czech government has made public an official preliminary estimate of damage caused by the sweeping floods - 60 to 90 billion Czech crowns which is approximately 2 to 3 billion USD. The catastrophe changed the lives of thousands upon thousands across the country. Many people are asking why, and are refusing to put all the blame on an unfortunate and unprecedented meteorological situation. More from Vladimir Tax.

A week after devastating floods swept through the Czech Republic, life in the country is slowly returning to normal. Thousands of people have returned from evacuation shelters to clean up their homes, take stock of their circumstances and learn to live with their losses. But not everyone has a home to come back to.

As the water in the Czech Republic has been receding, it may take two weeks before all the damages to both private and public property are assessed. However, one thing is clear - the devastating floods over the past two weeks caused more damage than the previous biggest floods in modern Czech history, five years ago. Although the total losses have not been established yet, government representatives say it will be necessary to revise next year's state budget priorities, including a purchase of modern supersonic fighter jets for the Czech Air Force.