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.

Prague- The Czech government Wednesday approved an agreement setting the rules for US troops at a planned missile defence base in the former Soviet-bloc country.

The Status of Forces Agreement is required for the United States to set up its first military base in Czech Republic. It complements the main US-Czech missile defence deal signed in Prague on July 8.

Czech Defence Minister Vlasta Parkanova said she and US Defence Secretary Robert Gates are expected to sign the second accord on September 19 on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in London.

Prague - The Czech economy slowed to 4.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2008 on the back of a firming koruna, skyrocketing consumer prices and a slump in Western Europe, according to revised gov

Prague  - A Czech appeals court Tuesday sentenced an 86-year- old retired prosecutor to six years in prison for her role in the state execution of a Czechoslovak anti-Nazi resistance fighter and democratic politician.

The Higher Court sentenced Ludmila Brozova-Polednova 58 years after she participated in sending Milada Horakova to the gallows on trumped-up charges of treason in a Stalinist-style show trial.

"Should I bear the guilt for everyone who was involved?" CTK news agency cited the former prosecutor as saying after the ruling, which was the first hearing in her case which she attended in person.