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On Tuesday the Czech government secured a crucial victory in a parliamentary confidence vote. The motion was called by the prime minister himself in an attempt to reassert the coalition's authority two weeks after it failed to unanimously support its joint candidate in Czech presidential elections. Not surprisingly this time the coalition held - it could hardly afford not to. With the slimmest of margins in the Lower House, and both opposition parties voting against, a single rebelling voice would have brought the government down.

Every day, Father Jan Lang leads a Czech mass in an upstairs room at the Velehrad religious, cultural and social centre on London's leafy Ladbroke Square. Velehrad has been a welcoming meeting place for young Czechs - and Slovaks - for many years and also serves as a hostel. Father Lang is in his 80s, and I asked him how long he'd been in London.

There is a worldwide ban on commercial whaling but the whales still aren't safe. Two countries, Japan and Norway, continue to hunt whales for profit and they are pushing for whaling to be legalised again. Greenpeace wants to ensure the two countries do not succeed in lifting the ban on whaling through the votes of countries to which Japan has in turn offered more development aid. Currently on tour around Central Europe, Greenpeace are collecting signatures calling on the countries' governments to become members of the International Whaling Commission

In recent years the tenth of March has been increasingly marked in the Czech Republic as the day when a Tibetan uprising was crushed by the Chinese in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in 1959. Since the end of communism in 1989, many Czechs have marked the anniversary by expressing sympathy and support for Tibetan independence. City and town halls around the Czech Republic have also displayed the Tibetan flag on their buildings as part of a worldwide initiative called "Flag for Tibet". In 1996, when the "Flag for Tibet" initiative first started here,

Why did Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla call Tuesday's vote of confidence? His centre-left coalition enjoys a majority of just one vote in the lower house, so why risk bringing down his already fragile government? Rob Cameron joins me in the studio now - why was this vote called Rob?

On Friday, former prime minister Vaclav Klaus officially became the second president of the Czech Republic. At the inauguration ceremony at Prague Castle, Mr Klaus took the presidential oath at a joint session of both houses of parliament.

Many of you will recall the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker just 200 kilometres off the coast of Galicia in northwest Spain last November. Thousands of tonnes of oil leaked into the sea, killing hundreds of birds, turtles and dolphins. Many of the area's fishermen are now unemployed, and a 2,900-kilometre stretch of the coastline has been devastated. To assist in the clean-up work, the Czech Republic's People in Need Foundation sent 45 volunteers to Galicia. After two weeks scraping oil off rocks in harsh weather conditions, the biggest non-Spanish

Nineteen people were killed and 34 injured on Saturday evening when a coach filled with skiers returning from the Austrian Alps crashed near the southern town of Ceske Budejovice. Police are still searching for clues as to what caused the horrific accident, one of the worst in the country's history. Rob Cameron reports.

The Czech Republic wants to play an active role in solving the Iraq crisis. At a meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell the Czech Foreign Minister, Cyril Svoboda, did not offer unequivocal support for the use of force, but he did promise Czech help in rebuilding Iraq after a possible war. At the same time the Czech Republic's anti-chemical unit has stepped up its work in Kuwait.

The death of nineteen-year old Zdenek Adamec - who set himself alight on Prague's Wenceslas Square on Thursday - has shocked Czech society. Among the first to react to the incident were the country's politicians, among them senator Jaroslava Moserova. Mrs Moserova is a burns specialist, and she was the first doctor to treat Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself alight on Wenceslas Square in 1969 to protest against what he said was widespread apathy in Czechoslovak society following the 1968 Soviet invasion.