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A couple of years ago, during one of our Christmas specials, Peter Smith and I did a short sketch on what it's like to be a reporter for Radio Prague. In the programme, we answered made-up questions, one of which was "with so many listeners from all over the world and different kinds of interests, how do you decide what press conference is important enough to be covered in the programme?" Our answer was simple: the one that is guaranteed to have the best refreshments. We were just joking, of course, but little did we know that there actually is

The row around the appointment of Pavel Pribyl as head of the government's office is now over. Mr Pribyl's problems became untenable when it emerged that he had commanded a riot police unit which beat up anti communist demonstrators in the streets of Prague in 1989. Pribyl resigned last Friday and will most likely be replaced by a man whose past could hardly be more different - former dissident Ales Sulc. Pribyl is gone -but a lot of questions remain unanswered. How is it possible for a man with such a history to have gone undetected for so long

Three former students from the Faculty of Architecture at Brno's Technical University were ordered by a Moravian court on Thursday to apologise for libel against their former teacher some fourteen years ago, during the turbulent days of the Velvet Revolution. The student body leaders labelled communist party representative Jan Snasel an "arrogant demagogue" and an "opportunist".

It's exactly fifteen years since one of the events that accelerated the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. January 1989 was the 20th anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself alight on Prague's Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet occupation. All through the week starting from the 15th January thousands of people gathered beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas with flowers, to remember Palach's sacrifice. Their quiet protest was put down by police in riot gear using water cannon, a gross over-reaction that

The Czech Republic has commemorated the fourteenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful movement that brought down the communist regime in 1989. Special ceremonies took place across the country on Monday to mark the anniversary. Top officials, including President Vaclav Klaus, laid flowers and lit candles on Narodni Street in Prague where the communist police brutally cracked down on a peaceful student demonstration on November 17th, 1989. The event triggered a series of demonstrations and strikes which eventually brought an end to four decades of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

During the second half of the 1980s, the tension that was created after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion in Czechoslovakia had eased, especially after the introduction of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union. The Czechoslovak leadership, however, still headed by Gustav Husak who came to power after the '68 invasion, was suspicious of movements intended to "reform communism from within" and continued to embrace a hard line. But by 1988 there were organized demonstrations demanding change and with the fall of the Berlin Wall and

A new book entitled "Students and Communist Rule between 1968 and 1989" has just appeared on the bookshelves. The aim is to highlight the special role Czech students played not only in overthrowing the communist regime fourteen years ago, but throughout the totalitarian era.

Translator and interpreter Katerina Vondrova left communist Czechoslovakia with her parents in 1981 when she was just ten years old. The family moved to Sydney, Australia and Katerina went to primary and secondary school there, without knowing whether she would ever be allowed to visit her native country again. She was in her final year of high school, preparing for a university course in Australia, when something happened on the other side of the globe that altered her plans and determined her future life.

Iska Lichter was born Jindriska Zofie Roudnicka in the town of Kolin, in 1930. The daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, she lived a normal life until 1939 and the Nazi occupation. Her parents divorced - deliberately - to avoid the family being persecuted. Her father sent the family to the countryside, he himself went to his mother's town of Podebrady. He was deported to Terezin in 1942 and later sent to Auschwitz, from which he never returned. Iska, who now lives in Colorado, says hardly a day goes by when she does not think of her