Prague  - The Czech police detained a 19-year-old German who allegedly raised his arm in a Nazi salute at a campsite near the city of Brno Friday, CTK news agency reported.

The man had been staying at the site during Brno's motorcycle races.

The police detained him on a lead from reporters, who noticed Thursday that he repeatedly made the salute while passing a tent fitted with a Nazi-era flag.

The suspect faces up to three years in prison for hate crime.

Prague  - Czech President Vaclav Klaus rejects comparisons between Russia's military assault in Georgia and the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, a newspaper reported Friday.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised the comparison before a trip Friday to Tbilisi for talks with pro-US Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on the week-old crisis.

"No, that doesn't work," Klaus told the Prague-based Mlada Fronta Dnes newspaper. "Dubcek was no Saakashvili."

Prague  - The Czech energy giant CEZ said Thursday its net profit rose by 67.2 per cent to 13.06 billion koruny (801.5 million dollars) in the second quarter of 2008, from 7.81 billion in the same period last year.

The state-controlled energy firm's April-June sales were up by 7 per cent year-on-year from 39.04 billion koruny to 41.82 billion koruny.

A hike in wholesale electricity prices, savings and an increased share of nuclear power generation were behind the strong results, the company said.

Prague  - Construction workers Wednesday discovered two 100- kilo WWII bombs concealed in a road bridge pillar in the south- eastern Czech town of Znojmo, police said.

"Colleagues from the bomb squad said they have never seen anything like this. They only read about it in the literature," police spokeswoman Lenka Drahokoupilova told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

An excavator operator working on the bridge unearthed a 30- centimetre-wide and one-metre-long bomb inside one of the stone- lined, dirt-filled pillars.

Prague  - Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Monday vetoed a law placing the country's chemical industry under tougher European Union rules, calling it bureaucratic and bad for business.

"Neither we nor the whole EU needs such regulation," Klaus said in a statement. "There is no reason to further toughen legislation in this field. People are not endangered by chemicals."

The bill, passed by parliament last month, implements an EU directive that requires manufacturers and importers to register chemicals with the new Helsinki-based European Chemicals Agency.

Prague  - Iconic images of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of then Czechoslovakia by acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka, which give powerful testimony to despair, solidarity and resistance in the face of Soviet tanks, opened in Prague Saturday.

The author, whose identity had been long concealed, captured shock, misery and the futile struggle for freedom as well as irony and unity on Prague streets in the days after the Warsaw Pact troops seized the country.