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At the end of last week, the Czech Republic was under ice. There were many car accidents, some of them fatal, but pedestrians walking on badly kept pavements in cities and towns were also hard hit. Many of them suffered arm and leg fractures or twisted ankles. Who is to blame remains unclear.

An interesting project aimed at teaching people more about ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic has just come to an end. Two non-governmental organisations - the Prague Multicultural Centre and Brno's Youth for Intercultural Understanding - took part in the project, which was called 'Diversity in Libraries' and was part of an anti-racism campaign launched by the Czech government at the beginning of this year. Alena Skodova reports:

With just a few days to go now till the tenth anniversary of the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, many people in both countries have been reflecting on just what brought about the demise of the federal republic the two nations had shared since its foundation in 1918.

Christmas trees are an inseparable part of Christmas, but there certainly there are countless ways of decorating them, according to cultural taste. In the Czech Republic, hand-made decorations have a long tradition. However, as Alena Skodova reports traditional Czech decorations are now facing competition from abroad.

The Czech folk-rock group Cechomor have just brought out a new live album, simply called "Cechomor Live" and the release caps a very successful year for the group. Last week I saw them play a two-hour set at Prague's Akropolis theatre, and immoderately good it was too.

One of the highly popular Christmas presents nowadays is a mobile phone. Although more than 80 percent of Czechs already own a mobile phone, sales traditionally peak before Christmas, with operators throwing in estimates of new activation numbers. But as Vladimir Tax reports, operators do not always have a reason to celebrate an increasing number of mobile users.

Four months after devastating floods hit much of the Czech Republic, the country still has its hands full recovering from the damage. With the winter having set in, those living in the flood-affected areas are waiting to see whether their buildings will survive the freezing temperatures. Dita Asiedu reports:

You know them from magazines or TV documentaries. The giant stone statues from Easter Island in the South Pacific, human heads on male torsos carved from volcanic ash. They belong to a number of stone monuments around the world, such as Stonehenge or the pyramids, whose origin remains a mystery, constantly tormenting teams of scientists trying to work out how ancient civilisations managed to move around blocks of stone weighing many tonnes. The mystery of the "moai" - as the statues are called in the local language - was solved seventeen years

This week we take a look at some more reasons for the demise of the Czechoslovak state. We examine in more detail some of the specifics which led to the Velvet Divorce almost 10 years ago:

Two years ago, the Budapest-based Open Society Institute launched a project called 'EU Accession Monitoring Programme'. The project focuses on assessing among other things how well the rights of ethnic minorities in EU candidate countries - and some EU members - are observed. Last week, the results of this year's surveys were published.