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The Czech first division football club Brno has not had a good season so far. After a series of humiliating defeats, which have left Brno second from bottom going into the winter break, the patience of the club’s owner is at an end. He has taken the extraordinary step of asking both players and the team’s manager to undergo voluntary lie detector tests.

Czech Environment Minister Pavel Drobil stepped down on Wednesday. His announcement followed the release of recordings made by the head of a department at his ministry, Libor Michálek, purporting to show Mr Drobil’s advisor pressuring him into corruption aimed at funding the minister’s political career. Another tape appeared to show Mr Drobil offering Mr Michálek a promotion – if he destroyed the original evidence. Pavel Drobil’s Civic Democrat party boss, Prime Minister Petr Necas, is standing by him – and both argue that his only mistake was a poor

Miroslav Tichý was nearly 80 years old when the surreptitious photographs he had taken of women and girls decades earlier were exhibited publicly for the first time. Combined with his story as a tramp-like recluse, the voyeuristic pictures’ eerie quality made Tichý an international art sensation. This week the first Prague exhibition of his work got underway.

Six post-communist EU members, including the Czech Republic have urged Brussels to push for an EU ban on denial of communist crimes. In a joint appeal sent to the EU’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, they argue that the principle of justice should assure the same approach to all totalitarian regimes. Holocaust denial is already banned in many EU states and the six nations petitioning the EU justice commissioner would like to see similar treatment applied to the crimes of communism.

The Czech environment minister, Civic Democrat Pavel Drobil, has announced his resignation over a corruption scandal at the ministry. Mr Drobil’s decision came hours after the daily Mladá fronta Dnes exposed practices aimed at channelling money from the ministry-controlled State Environmental Fund.

Unusually cold weather has claimed 13 lives in Prague since October – 11 of them in December alone. A combination of hypothermia and alcohol played a role. With severe conditions expected to continue, the question now is how quickly help for the city’s homeless can be provided to try and stop what should be preventable deaths.

A new poll commissioned by the Czech Finance Ministry and the central bank showed that most Czechs lack basic financial knowledge, and do not understand some of the fundamental principles of borrowing. Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek has described the results were “shocking”, and said he would push for more financial education at Czech schools.

Cards featuring the work of Josef Lada are an integral part of Czech Christmas. Lada is best known internationally for illustrations of the Good Soldier Švejk, but his simply drawn carol singers, snow covered villages and nativity scenes are just as popular in his native country. His grandson, also named Josef Lada, says the artist's images capture something everyone can relate to.

The Czech Bank Card Association has warned ATM card users that fraudsters in Prague have come up with a new method of ripping-off bank accounts: it has come to the light that there were several incidents in the capital in November when a taxi driver quietly switched a customer’s bank card he had been handed, for someone else’s, later making a withdrawal. It is unclear how many times the scenario was repeated but at least one such case is now under investigation by the police.

A Czech married couple from a sleepy town in south Bohemia have turned out to be a pair of wanted bank robbers in neighbouring Germany. The pair are suspected of having robbed 20 bank outlets over the last 15 years, getting away with a total of around two million euros. On Friday, however, their luck ran out. The man died in a shoot-out with police in the German town of Karlsruhe, while the woman killed herself after seeing her accomplice killed by police bullets.