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British officials are again screening all passengers flying to the United Kingdom from Prague's Ruzyne airport. Britain first launched the controls in June 2001, in an effort to prevent members of the country's Roma minority from applying for asylum in the UK. Around 300 people were turned away at the airport between August and December last year.

Monday saw the end of a five-day hunger strike held by a dozen anti-nuclear activists who were protesting against the controversial Temelin nuclear power plant in south Bohemia. The strike, which could be monitored on the internet via webcam, took place in a wooden container on the main square of the Upper Austrian town of Freistadt. According to its organisers, some two hundred activists have already volunteered to continue with the hunger strike in various parts of Austria. Members of the organisation Stop Temelin, who have in the past organised protest demonstrations and border blockades in opposition to the power plant, now hope to have activated a chain-reaction of hunger strikes.

A new opinion poll released on Saturday claimed that Vaclav Klaus, former prime minister and leader of the opposition Civic Democrats, would emerge as the clear winner if a popular vote were held to elect a new president. The poll, conducted by the Sofres-Factum agency, said Mr Klaus would come first with 34 percent, far ahead of his rivals. The two houses of parliament meet in a joint session on January 15th in a bid to choose a successor to President Vaclav Havel. However observers say the vote could fail to produce a winner, and there is a growing consensus among politicians that the parliamentary election should be replaced by a popular vote.

Towns and villages in north Bohemia were bracing themselves for flooding on Saturday, after heavy rain and melting snow caused rivers to burst their banks. As water levels slowly return to normal in the rest of the country, the northern city of Usti nad Labem was preparing for a wave of floodwater from the swollen river Elbe. Officials are also closely monitoring the River Vltava in Prague, where villages on the outskirts of the city have already been flooded. There has also been isolated flooding in southern and western Bohemia. The worst floods in five hundred years devastated large areas of the Czech Republic in August, leaving more than a dozen people dead and causing several billion dollars of damage.