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Wednesday was the most dramatic day yet for the Czech Republic at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Speed skater Martina Sáblíková made history when she became the first Czech to win two gold medals at one Winter Games, while there was also sensational news in cross country skiing with the men’s relay team taking bronze. However, there was also huge disappointment for Czech fans, when the country’s ice hockey team were knocked out in the quarter-finals.

Built at the end of the 1980s to host communist party gatherings, Prague’s Congress Centre was the pride of the communist leadership. However, within years of building it, the communists lost power and the centre never became fully functional. In 2000 it hosted a summit of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but soon ran into debt and now finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy.

The Czech hockey team survived a scare against Latvia in their first elimination match-up at the Olympics on Tuesday. After three periods the game went down the wire and overtime was needed to break the 2:2 tie. In the end, the Czechs advanced to the next round but the game could have easily gone either way.

Nearly 10 percent of all agricultural land in the Czech Republic is now given over to organic farming, according to new data from the Ministry of Agriculture. The number of organic farms in the country at the end of 2009 was just under 2,700, an increase of 50 percent on the previous year that is due at least in part to government subsidies. I discussed the growth in the sector with Vojtěch Kotecký of the Czech branch of Friends of the Earth.

Public transport around the Czech Republic will grind to a halt in the early hours of Monday as the country’s trade unions go on strike. They will protest against higher taxation of employee benefits, introduced by the government at the beginning of this year. The strike is expected to affect all means of public transport and disrupt life around the country.

Originally, one million doses of the swine flu vaccine was to have been available only to those at the greatest health risk, including health workers and those suffering from serious and long-term illnesses. Now, that has changed: on Monday the government agreed that the vaccine will be available to almost all. The only question is, whether the new broad access to the swine flu shot will boost what until now has been surprisingly low interest.

Everyone knows what the ubiquitous New York yellow cabs look like. Prague Town Hall, too, is pushing for the bright shade to be the color of taxi cabs operating in the city, but legislation at this point does not allow for the city to force taxi companies to abide by just one shade.

The Czech government has come to grips with the so-called fat cat wages and golden handshakes enjoyed by managers of some state companies. It will put into effect a new framework making performance a much bigger factor in pay packets and capping redundancy payments for managers moving on.

Pupils at primary and secondary schools around the country will receive a new comic book soon; it’s called My World and it’s all about a Chechen refugee struggling to adjust to his new life in the Czech Republic, including dealing with prejudice and hostility. Magda Faltová, director of the Prague-based NGO the Association for Integration and Migration which produced the comic book, told us more.

Mene Tekel, Prague’s annual international festival against totalitarianism, opens in the Czech capital on Monday afternoon with a concert by Jaroslav Hutka and the Blue Effect band on Old Town Square. Now in its fourth year, the festival offers a week full of debates, films screenings and a number of rock concerts.