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How long does it take to build a snowman in the middle of summer? A radio station in the German city of Leipzig recently decided to find out and challenged listeners to take part in a snowman-building contest. The resulting scurry to find enough snow to put together a snowman led to an incident that is now being investigated by the Czech police.

In the Czech Republic, over 65,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year and over 28,000 die from the disease. But Czechs seem to be more prone to get some types of cancer than others. Four times as many Czech women are diagnosed with cervical cancer than their Scandinavian counterparts.

The Czech Republic posted a foreign trade deficit of 7.8 billion crowns in the first of half of 2004. One year on, economic data released on Monday has shown a dramatic turnaround, with this country now boasting a foreign trade surplus of 38 billion crowns in the first six months of this year. The markets were expecting good news, but the record high figure for the month of June caught analysts by surprise. Brian Kenety has more.

The first major privatisation tender to have been won by a Russian company was finalised last week. Russia's Evraz Holding is now set to take over Vitkovice Steel, one of Europe's biggest producers of heavy plates and a major player in the depressed industrial region of Ostrava.

Every Czech football fan remembers Antonin Panenka's decisive penalty kick against Germany to win the 1976 European Championship. Many of these fans also supported the team Panenka played with for many years - Bohemians Football Club, which was one of the top teams in this country in the 1970s and 80s. Unfortunately, like many clubs in the harsh economic climate of the post-communist era, Bohemians went bust in this, their centenary year. But determined fans have - against all odds - saved the club from extinction.

Have you ever visited a Prague restaurant and faced a particularly grumpy waiter? Or still worse, found yourself being overcharged? In the last six months the Czech Trade Inspection has checked over 3500 restaurants around the country and in more than 40 percent found that the Law on Consumer Protection has been violated.

When the wartime blitz hit London in 1940, Czechoslovak President in exile Edvard Benes was urged to pack up and seek refuge in the English countryside. For the next five years, Benes and his wife lived in The Abbey, a country estate owned by the Rothschild family, in the picturesque village of Aston Abbots. His staff found safe haven at Wingrave Manor in a nearby village, while some 100 Czechoslovak soldiers kept a watchful eye. Local history enthusiast Neil Rees has a new book on the period, full of local colour and drawing heavily on the stories

Twenty-five years ago, in communist Czechoslovakia, the young judge Vlasta Formankova sentenced a man to ten months in prison. All he had done was to throw a group of local party apparatchiks out of his restaurant. Twenty-five years later that "error of judgment", as she now calls it, almost prevented her being nominated as a Constitutional Court judge. On Thursday members of the Czech Senate, responsible for approving the president's choices to serve as judges in the court, debated Formankova's nomination heatedly, with a slim majority in

What has the Czech singer/songwriter, Jaromir Nohavica - singing to the nothing more than an acoustic guitar - have in common with the endlessly repetitive rhythms of Techno? The answer is quite simple. Nohavica, famed for his protest songs going back to the days of communism and his role in the recent Czech film Year of the Devil, has composed a brand new protest song. He is responding to last weekend's huge techno-party that ended in violent clashes between participants and the police, who used tear gas, water cannon and batons to end the rave.

Czech roads have one of the worst reputations in Europe thanks to an appalling number of road accidents and related fatalities every year. Although legislators have now spent almost two years trying to agree on an overhaul in legislation improving the situation, they're not quite there yet.