Prague - Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek welcomed Washington's decision, announced Friday by US President George W Bush, to allow Czechs to travel to the United States without visas.

The new policy is set to go into effect within a month.

"It is virtually the largest success we could have achieved. It lifts the last relic of communism and the Cold War. I am thus very happy," Topolanek said in a statement.

Prague - Czech voters Friday began casting ballots in regional and Senate elections that could shake up Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek's rule and affect the country's ratification of the EU Lisbon Treaty.

The Czech Republic has been divided into 14 regions since 2000. Their governments have been since dominated by Topolanek's senior ruling Civic Democratic Party.

Prague, also a Civic Democratic bastion, is officially a region but its government is elected in a municipal election that last took place in 2006.

Prague - The Czech government approved a legislative proposal Tuesday that doubles savings guarantees to 50,000 euros (68,000 dollars) in a bid to prevent people from pulling out their money from Czech banks, officials said.

"This step should contribute to absolute confidence of savers in our system," Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said.

The Czech Republic currently protects 90 per cent of retail bank deposits up to 25,000 euros.

Prague - Acclaimed Czech-born writer Milan Kundera turned in a Western agent as a student during the Stalinist era, leading to the man's imprisonment at a labour camp, a magazine reported Monday.

Police records show that Kundera, then a 20-year-old Prague film student, denounced a young Czech exile who was spying in his native country in 1950, the Respekt weekly said.

Kundera, who later gained fame as an anti-communist dissident and international acclaim for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, told Czechoslovak police that a former military pilot who worked for Western intelligence after escaping to Germany was staying with a female friend at a dormitory, the report said.

Prague - Gunter Demnig kneels on Prague's poshest shopping street, tapping a shining block into the cobblestone pavement beside a luxury-watch store.

"Here lived Eva Abelesova, born 1930, deported to Lodz in 1941 and murdered," reads the inscription under the Neo-Renaissance residential building at 10, Parizska Avenue.

In all, the German sculptor this week placed 10 such memorial cubes, which he calls stumbling blocks (Stolpersteine) in German, into the Prague streetscape, his first batch in the Czech Republic.

He brought them in his red van from Germany, equipped for the task with buckets of cobbling necessities: rubber-padded hammer, cement and sand.

Prague - A murky post-communist past of privatization deals and influence peddling is catching up with Czech politicians of all stripes as election season nears. But will it have an impact?

Late Thursday, a 55-year-old Prague hotelier fatally shot a 40-year-old businessman after what likely was a petty brawl at a posh downtown restaurant.

Remarkable enough in one of Europe's most charming capitals and a nation with little gun crime, the shooting reverberated because of its political connotation.