Budapest - The management of Budapest's Ferihegy International Airport were hoping for less disruption on Thursday as airport workers went on strike for a second day.

"The unions will go ahead with the strike and reject the employer's ultimatum that the resumption of negotiations is conditional on us calling off the strike," said Zoltan Kovacs, strike leader and head of one of the two main unions representing workers at the airport, on Thursday morning.

Budapest - Workers at Budapest's Ferihegy International Airport went on strike at 6 am on Wednesday in protest over working conditions and amid fears of redundancies.

A few aircraft were able to take off in the early hours, but at around 7 am security staff joined the strike, effectively stopping passengers from proceeding to the boarding gates.

Domokos Szollar, a spokesman for the airport operator Budapest Airport, said that a new team of security personnel was due to start work at 11 am and it is hoped some of them would be prepared to work. Incoming flights had not been affected so far.

Budapest  - Delays and cancellations are expected when workers at Budapest's Ferihegy International Airport begin an indefinite strike at 6 am (0500 GMT) on Wednesday.

A spokesman for Budapest Airport told the state news agency MTI that there are 250 flights scheduled in and out of Budapest Wednesday.

Krisztina Nemeth, a spokeswoman for the Hungarian national airline Malev said she could not say how many flights will be affected, as Malev had not yet been officially informed of the strike.

Budapest - The Hungarian National Bank announced on Monday a cut in its base rate from 11 per cent to 10.5 per cent.

This is the second time in less than a month that the bank's monetary council has cut its benchmark rate by 50 basis points, the last being on November 24.

The central bank raised its base rate a whopping 3 percentage points to 11.5 percent on October 22 amid fears that speculators could cause a collapse of the national currency, the forint.

Budapest - The leader of Hungary's opposition centre-right Fidesz party, Viktor Orban, said Monday the government should reduce taxes and interest rates to kickstart the economy.

Orban criticized the minority Socialist government for sticking to an austerity drive that started back in 2006 when Hungary had the highest budget deficit in the EU, at
9.2 per cent of gross domestic product.

He said the 20 million-euro credit line offered jointly by the IMF, EU and World Bank at the end of October to shore up an economy on the brink of collapse could now be used to fund growth-stimulating tax and interest rate cuts.

Budapest - Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom met his Slovak counterpart Ivan Gasparovic on Saturday in the latest bid to defuse language and minority rights tensions between their countries.

The meeting of the two men in the Slovak town of Nove Zamky was the latest in a series of diplomatic moves aimed at easing long- standing tensions between the two countries.

Solyom and Gasparovic agreed on the use of dual Hungarian and Slovak place names in textbooks designed for use in ethnic Hungarian schools, a measure approved by the Slovak parliament on Wednesday.