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The Czech Republic's art and antique auction houses certainly have a season to look forward to if this year's opening auction at the Dorotheum auction house in Prague is anything to go by. Three records were broken on Saturday. Items valued at 14 million crowns (a little over half a million US dollars) were sold for 22 million (around 900,000 US dollars), the best turnover that the country's established houses have ever witnessed.

Czech demographers have been saying it for years and now it has been confirmed by the EU as well: Czechs are dying out. A population forecast released this week by the EU statistics office Eurostat predicts that by the year 2050 the number of Czechs will drop from 10 million to 8,800,000. Without immigration, the population might plummet to 8.1 million.

Czech efforts to get the EU to take a united stand in condemning Islamic violence in the wake of the controversy over caricatures of the prophet Mohammed have failed to bear fruit - only increasing tension between the Czech Republic and Arab states. Moreover, a number of Arab countries have protested against a documentary on the life of Moslems featured on Czech television, which they say shows Moslems as dangerous radicals.

Among the sweeping changes of the last 15 years in the Czech Republic, the diet of Czechs has also undergone a transformation. Though mostly this has been a shift away from traditional Czech foods, lately, game has been making a comeback as a popular dish. This can be best illustrated by the exploding numbers of game farms.

The death of four-year-old Eric, a Czech boy who was given to adoptive parents in Sweden less than a year ago, has shocked people in both countries. When he died there were signs that he had been neglected and physically abused, and this has called into question the whole practice of overseas adoptions. Could this tragedy have been prevented by the Czech or Swedish authorities? Do applicants from abroad undergo thorough screening before a child's adoption is approved and is there someone who monitors their welfare once they reach their new home?

International icon Madonna may be enjoying phenomenal success with her new album "Confessions on a Dance Floor", but her lawyers may have to inform her she's made something of a slip-up. According to reports, the singer founded a new company called Semtex Girls Ltd. - a move that puts her potentially at odds with the Czech explosives company that developed the Semtex plastic explosive made infamous by terrorists in the 1980s. The company now produces the explosive only in very limited amounts for the Czech army, but it continues to own the

A full military band was on hand to welcome Russia's President Vladimir Putin to Prague on Wednesday - the first state visit by a Russian president for 13 years. Waiting for him at the Castle gates was the Czech president Vaclav Klaus, who later held a state banquet in Mr Putin's honour.

"Travelers' Tales Prague and the Czech Republic" is the name of a new book which has just been launched in the United States. It features - as do all the books in the "Travelers' Tales" series - the work of a number of writers of varying backgrounds, including a couple of very well known names. One of its editors, David Farley, discussed the new publication with me on the phone from New York.

Russian President Vladimir Putin began a 2-day state visit to the Czech Republic on Wednesday—the first official visit to this country by a Russian head-of-state since President Yeltsin came 13 years ago. Relations between the two countries have not always been warm during the last decade: Moscow did not react positively when the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, and during the 1990s the Czech Republic expressed sympathy for the Chechen cause—another point of annoyance for the Russian Federation. Now, as Presidents Vladimir Putin and Vaclav Klaus

50 years ago on Saturday, the Communist Party in Moscow fell silent as Nikita Khrushchev took the podium at the 20th Party Conference to deliver his famous "Secret Speech". This monumental attack on Stalin's brutal rule had a great impact on many countries of the Soviet Bloc, and was the beginning of the end for hard-line Stalinism in many countries. Chris Jarrett takes a look at how Czechoslovak society reacted to this political shift.