Islamabad - Pakistani rescue workers on Sunday retrieved the body of Czech Republic Ambassador Ivo Zdarek from the wreckage of the Marriott hotel that was attacked by a suicide bomber, officials s

Prague, London  - Czech Defence Minister Vlasta Parkanova and her US counterpart Robert Gates Friday have signed a deal on rules for stationing US troops at a planned missile defence base in the ex-communist country, the Czech Defence Ministry said.

The ministers inked the so-called Status of Forces Agreement on the sidelines of NATO's informal meeting in London. The accord complements a main diplomatic treaty signed in Prague on July 8.

Despite Moscow's fierce objections, Washington plans to place a tracking radar in a military zone south-west of Prague as well as 10 interceptor missiles in neighbouring Poland.

Prague - German bank Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg (LBBW) said it has entered the Czech market Wednesday through a takeover of a subsidiary of Austria's BAWAG Bank in the Czech Republic.

Prague  - State-owned Prague Airport plans to lay off some 160 employees, who account for 7 per cent of firm's workforce, before privatization planned for next year, it was announced Thursday.

In a bid to get in shape prior to the privatization, the company running the airport plans to start cutting the jobs in December. The airport will also cancel 90 vacant positions.

"It is clear that this step will raise the value of our company from the perspective of potential investors," airport's executive manager Miroslav Dvorak said in a statement.

The Czech center-right government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek is either to sell or lease Ruzyne international airport, the second largest in Central Europe after Vienna.

Prague  - Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has agreed to work with Czech-American film director Milos Forman on his planned new film, Havel's office confirmed Thursday.

Havel, a communist-era dissident playwright, has cooperated on a screenplay with Forman for a film about the 1938 Munich Conference, in which Czechoslovak allies allowed Hitler to annex the country's German-inhabited border regions.

Czechs view the deal, signed on September 30 by France, Germany, Italy and Britain, as a betrayal by the French who failed to honour military alliances between Paris and Prague.

New Delhi  - Two Czech nationals have been sentenced by a local court in India for illegally collecting rare species of insects from a national park, news reports said Thursday.

Petr Svecha, an entomologist, was fined 20,000 rupees (444 US dollars) while Emil Kucera, a forest official was sentenced to three years' simple imprisonment and a fine of
60,000 rupees by a magistrate in eastern West Bengal's state's Darjeeling town on Wednesday, The Telegraph newspaper reported.

The two men had been arrested outside the Singalila National Park in Darjeeling district on June 22 by West Bengal forest officials who had seized beetles, butterflies and other insects from them along with equipment.