Panorama | All stories

Among the films premiered at this year's Berlin Film Festival was a German-language picture called Die Falscher - The Counterfeiter. It is based on the remarkable memoirs of Adolf Burger. Along with 140 other Jewish concentration camp prisoners, he survived the war after being enlisted to take part in an ambitious Nazi counterfeiting plot aimed at crashing the economies of the Allies.

The news that two twelve year old girls attempted to commit suicide late last year because of class bullying sent shockwaves across the country and once again highlighted a growing problem in Czech society: violence among the young. We look at the roots of the problem and what can be done about it.

Esperanto in the Czech lands goes back more than one hundred years. Individual enthusiasts were already promoting the language at the end of the 19th century, and in the 1920s the first clubs and associations started to emerge. In 1921, a world Esperanto congress was held in Prague and in the 1930s Czechoslovak Radio started airing brodacasts in Esperanto. The Second World War, however, put an end to this development. After a brief renaissance after the war, the movement was once again suppressed and came back to life again in 1969.

I have just arrived at Prague's Na Homolce hospital. Last week, its cardiologists performed the first ever robot-assisted heart surgery in the country and they have since successfully operated on six patients.

The Prague metro - this is where I would most probably have become just another statistic if I - trapped with four neo-Nazis - hadn't escaped a split second before the doors of the wagon closed. In the Czech Republic people of mixed race like myself - I'm half Ghanaian - and foreigners of different ethnic backgrounds are always wary of our surroundings. But surprisingly, the police and anti-extremist NGOs say there is no need for our heightened attention. With only a few exceptions, foreigners are relatively safe from far-right extremists.

It's 10am in the south Bohemian town of Ceske Budejovice. Just like on any other day, Czech Radio's local station starts its daily show Pisnicky pro radost, "Songs to lift your spirit", knowing its listenership is about to shoot up and stay up for the three hours in which one brass music song after the next is dedicated to locals.

The Villa Tugendhat, a functionalist family home designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the Czech Republic's only 20th century UNESCO site. The city of Brno is considering whether or not to return the valuable architectural treasure to the children of the original owners. The Tugendhat family, who are Jewish, lost possession of the house in the late 1930s, after only eight years living there.

The civic organisation Promethea has just launched a new project aimed at boosting the self-confidence of the Czech nation, especially those in the labour force. The project supports the prevention of unemployment, the development of human resources, and integration into the labour market. It is funded from the budgets of both the state and the City of Prague as well as the European Social Fund.

In Panorama today, we turn the hands of time back to the days of the mammoth hunters some 25,000 years ago. The country's biggest prehistoric burial grounds are found in Moravia - at Pavlov, Dolni Vestonice and Predmosti - and are among the most important archaeological sites in Europe.

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.