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Czech Scrabble fans say that it can change your life. The game, where you put together words with tiles, can easily grow into an obsession. The best Czech Scrabble players tested their vocabulary last weekend at the 11th Scrabble Championship of the Czech Republic.

December 1st marks World AIDS Day in the fight against AIDS, one of the world's deadliest diseases whose spread in parts of the world has reached epidemic proportions. 40 million people worldwide are now infected with the HIV virus that leads to the disease; this year alone 3 million have died. With such alarming numbers, it is more important than ever to increase AIDS awareness and to promote safe sex, and organisations in the Czech Republic have been doing their share, setting up stands throughout the country providing information, offering free

No other Czech singer has dominated so solidly and for so long as Czech nightingale Karel Gott. At 65, Mr Gott remains enormously popular both in the Czech Republic and abroad, notably in Germany and Russia. Now Karel Gott has released a new album - called "Muj strazny andel" - "My Guardian Angel", which even the singer himself is calling his best so far.

Don't let the rushing water and tropical birds fool you into thinking you've left Prague. At the city's zoo, hundreds of people, including President Vaclav Klaus and the Indonesian ambassador, visited Monday's opening of the Indonesian Jungle Pavilion. The exhibit aims to create the experience of a Southeast Asian rainforest - both for visitors and for the zoo's population of Indonesian primates. We take you on a walk through the exhibit.

Ukrainians at home and abroad wait with great anticipation to see if a re-election will be called. Yesterday, members of the Forum Ukrajincu or Ukrainian Forum and Czech Green Party members gathered together on Prague's Wenceslas Square to voice their concerns. The Green party took a clear stance- they were not there to show their support any specific candidate- their main concern were the democratic processes themselves. On the other hand, the Ukrainians at the gathering were clearly Yushchenko supporters.

Many studies regarding population growth in the Czech Republic have come to the same conclusion, Czechs are having fewer children and the population is shrinking. The United Nations estimates that in 50 years the Czech population will diminish by an astonishing one and a half million people, fifteen percent of the current population. Martin Hrobsky spoke with social science professor Ladislav Rabusic and asked him, are Czechs really dwindling away?

Prague is seriously considering making a bid to host the summer Olympic Games. Although two previous bids were unsuccessful, the city hall authorities feel that this time things could really work out. Although the target years are 2016 or 2020, the city hall has already unveiled big plans for the event.

Fans of Czech literature will no doubt already be familiar with Jaroslav Hasek's early 20th century novel "The Good Soldier Svejk", a massive satirical tome in which the author's ridiculously smiling, moon-faced hero, Svejk, reduces the Austro-Hungarian Empire to something of a mockery in the course of his adventures in the First World War. Now Svejk has been adapted for the stage. A new theatre production is underway at the Theatre for a New Audience in New York, based on an adaptation by Irish playwright Colin Teevan.

The world's largest bottle of wine was auctioned off at Sotheby's in New York last weekend. Dubbed "Maximus" by the president of the U.S. chapter of the Court of Master Sommeliers, the mammoth bottle -- which contains over 1,200 glasses of red wine -- was fashioned by Czech craftsmen and glassblowers.

Human trafficking is increasingly taking center stage as one of the world's most important, yet most invisible crimes. After the fall of communism in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia two years later, political and economic instability in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe provided fertile ground for criminal exploitation of human beings. Sex trafficking became an ever-growing tragedy, but other forms of exploitation, such as forced labor, have also come to the fore. Maida Agovic reports about efforts to counter