A new lap record was set up by the world champion Casey Stoner and took pole position for Sunday US MotoGP at the Laguna Seca circuit.  

The Ducati rider who set the time one minute 20.700 seconds is looking for his fourth successive win of the season. The lap record is two seconds faster than was set by him last year.

Honda’s Nicky Harden completed the first row of the grid though Yamaha's Valentino Rossi was the second quickest and was slower by 0.447s.                                                    

In California circuit, Britain’s James Toseland appeared in fifth position at the time of 1:21:848s.

Prague  - A Polish woman, a Ukrainian man and three Czechs were among the seven victims of Friday's train accident in eastern Czech Republic, the worst in 13 years, police said Saturday.

Revising its earlier reports, police said that four young women and two men, one young and one middle-aged, died when a speeding international train with some 400 passengers onboard rammed into a collapsed bridge in the north-eastern town of Studenka.

Prague - The Czech Republic's unemployment rate was down to 4.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2008, the lowest in more than 11 years, according to government data released Friday.

The April-June reading, which was based on EU-wide International Labour Organization (ILO) methodology, was down by 1.1 points year- on-year and well bellow the three-month eurozone average of slightly above 7.2 per cent, the Czech Statistical Office said.

The fast-growing Czech economy has been troubled by labour shortages following an influx in recent years of foreign investors, mostly car and electronics makers, to the ex-communist Central European state of 10 million.

Prague  - Former Czech president Vaclav Havel urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to enable full access to information at the Beijing Olympics, according to an open letter released Thursday by a Czech human rights group.

The letter says that Olympians must learn about China's human rights record as the Olympic Charter puts sports at the service of promoting "a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity".

The signatories of the letter, released by the Prague-based Olympic Watch, also include South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Member of European Parliament Baroness Emma Nicholson and Chinese democratic activist Wei Jingsheng.

Prague- A Czech court Monday allowed the handing over of an Irish child abuse suspect to Britain where he is wanted for allegedly having sex with two girls aged 12 and 13, the court said.

Patrick Burnell, 21, who was detained in mid-July in a Prague apartment where he had been hiding for two years, agreed with the extradition, said spokesman for the Prague Municipal Court Petr Kulawiak.

British authorities suspect Burnell of 16 child abuse offenses. He allegedly sexually abused the two underaged girls and produced and possessed child pornography between 2003 and 2006, Czech police said.

Prague - Polish and Czech leaders planned Friday to discuss the future of the European Union's reform treaty, which the Czech president declared dead after Irish voters rejected it.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski's visit to Prague has led to speculation that he will urge his Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus to support the Lisbon Treaty, which neither country has ratified.

The two leaders were to discuss "developments in the European Union after rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland" over dinner Thursday, Klaus's office said.

Klaus is a longtime critic of the EU accord, designed to streamline decision-making in the expanded 27-nation bloc. He says it's too federalist and too much like a European constitution.