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Jan Sokol, the presidential candidate of the Czech coalition government, will vie for the presidency with former Czech prime minister Vaclav Klaus in Friday's third attempt to elect a successor to Vaclav Havel. But Mr Sokol is not as well known as his competitor: while Mr Klaus served as prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 1997, Mr Sokol held some less prominent political offices in the 1990s, and spent most of the decade engaging in academic pursuits. So who is Jan Sokol?

A three year sentence has been handed down to a 20-year-old man for making a series of hoax telephone calls claiming there were bombs at Ruzyne airport. The man made a total of four hoax calls last summer, forcing airport authorities to evacuate the building and cancel several flights.

Tuesday is the fifty-fifth anniversary of what the Communists called Victorious February. On the 25th February 1948, the Communist Party chief and hardline Stalinist, Klement Gottwald, announced to ecstatic crowds on Prague's Wenceslas Square that Czechoslovakia's government had resigned, and that his Communists were now in power. This was the last nail in the coffin of Czechoslovakia's fragile post-war democracy, and the start of forty years of hardline communism. A service to mark one of the bleakest anniversaries in modern Czech history was

On Monday another fatal accident involving a military aircraft happened in the Czech Republic. This is the twenty fourth fatality in a string of airforce accidents in the past decade, which have claimed the lives of some of the country's elite pilots.

Czech politics has been hit by a series of bugging allegations in recent days, all involving members of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and mobile phones from the country's largest operator, Eurotel. But it has not yet been confirmed whether the cases actually involve bugging or are instead the result of human or technical errors.

Last week saw bad news for customers of the Ostrava-based bank Union banka, after the cash-strapped bank announced Friday it had shut the doors of more than 100 branches and stopped payments. The decision left some 250,000 customers and businesses unable to access their accounts, at least for the time being, and the bank is now teetering on the edge of collapse. The bank's majority shareholder Invesmart is currently hoping to reach a compromise with the Czech government.

Last week saw much anger and disappointment among the eastern European candidate countries for EU membership after French President Jacques Chirac harshly criticised their support of the United States' tough stance on Iraq. With EU expansion nearing amid deep divisions among NATO and EU members over the Iraqi crisis, Czech and Polish politicians met at the end of last week for talks. Here's Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz:

Less than a month ago, news broke that the Czech Republic's unemployment rate would surpass the ten percent mark. With such pessimistic numbers, why not try for a job in the EU? The Czech Republic and nine other countries expected to be fully-fledged members in 2004, and the European Union has to prepare for the changes. Practically overnight, its population will increase by twenty percent, it will have two thirds more member states and many more official languages. The EU is therefore offering Czechs five hundred job opportunities at its institutions

With the possible war against Iraq increasing security risks around the world, the Czech Interior Ministry has stepped up security measures as a precaution against terrorism, including bioterrorism. Tight security is in place at water resources and water plants and also food-processing plants. But what exactly is bioterrorism?

It is a major artery into the city, spanning almost half a kilometre and rising an average of forty metres above the ground, the Nusle bridge. Made of the highest quality reinforced concrete, Prague's most dominant bridge spans not a river but the wide Nusle Valley, joining the district of Pankrac with Karlov, leading the city's congested magistrala highway straight into the centre of town. This weekend it will be thirty years since the bridge first officially opened. Most agree that life in Prague today would be unthinkable without it.