Panorama | All stories

Year after year in the Czech Republic more and more people have grown increasingly interested in board games gaining in popularity here. There are perhaps only a handful of specialty stores, but they are stocking more titles than ever. This year we thought we'd return to board games as a subject at Christmas since, 2006 was also a very interesting one for Czech game designers, who made something of a splash at Essen - perhaps the most famous games convention held in Germany every year. All that, in today's Panorama.

It has become a tradition now that each December the Prague City Museum holds a Christmas-themed exhibit, most often displaying historic nativity scenes once manufactured in the Czech lands. But, these days such exhibits are a "dime a dozen", so this year the museum opted for something a little different. Organisers approached three collectors to help put together a show on antique dolls. The result is "Dolls of Our Grandmothers", displaying more than 600 dolls from 19th and early 20th centuries. If you're a fan or a collector, this is a show not

Subutex is an opiate narcotic which doctors frequently prescribe to help heroin addicts kick their habit. But here in the Czech Republic, some addicts have discovered ways to abuse the drug, which is also known as buprenorphine. A government study recently confirmed a disturbing pattern of subutex abuse, much of which happens in plain sight.

The Senate is currently mapping the life and times of 19th and early 20th century parliamentarians with a new exhibition. "Parliament in the reflection of time" - this new exhibition documents the life of Czech politicians one hundred years ago...the important events they witnessed, the lives they led, the causes they defended, and the decisions they made from the 1800s up to the 1930s.

It's just a few weeks now before November 17th, the seventeenth anniversary of the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, when peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people brought the country's communist regime to its knees. Seventeen years on, coming to terms with the past is still difficult. One problem is the country's schoolbooks, which give only the briefest glimpse of the indignities and cruelties of the communist era. But the Czech NGO People in Need is trying to change all that.

According to statistics, criminality among Czech youth has been decreasing: in general, children under the age of fifteen committed fewer serious crimes - such as murder - in the year 2005. On the other hand the number of other offences - for example cases of pick pocketing by children rose by some two hundred cases.

The country's first post-communist president Vaclav Havel celebrates his 70th birthday on Thursday, so this week he invited a few friends round to eat, drink and be merry. Just a few friends - around 1,000 - who queued up outside the medieval St Anne's Church in the Old Town - a deconsecrated building which is now home to Mr Havel's Prague Crossroads cultural centre. They were there to pay homage to the man who did so much to bring about the fall of communism, and so much in the first 13 years after it. Among the well-wishers was Monika Pajerova,

South of Prague near the town of Pribram is a decommissioned military airstrip just off the highway. Before you see any sign of the airport you see the sky above filled with parachutes gently falling towards the earth. Welcome to the Pribram drop zone. The man in command of this place is checking a flight manifest - or passenger list - and scanning the skies with a high tech pair of binoculars.

Harvard University in Massachusetts is one of the best known universities in the world and attracts the cream of under- and post-graduate students from around the world. The first Czech to graduate from the august institution was Gerhardt Bubnik in 1969.Today, almost forty years later, there are over forty Czech Harvard graduates. They meet in the Harvard Club Prague, which was set up by Mr Bubnik in 1993, attending presentations which are followed by heated discussions.

In the second half of the 20th century governments as well as various international organizations decided to pay more attention to low numbers of women involved in politics: today the European parliamentary average is about 16%. The Czech Republic, slightly below the average, follows Uzbekistan, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic in 62nd place on the worldwide chart.