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The manager of Arsenal football club, Arsene Wenger, said he tried and failed to sign Czech international goalkeeper Petr Cech before he joined Chelsea last year. Wenger said Arsenal wanted to sign the player from French club Rennes, but could not get a work permit for him. Cech, who is 22, has been a huge success since joining Chelsea, conceding just eight goals in 24 league games this season.

The Czech Republic is likely to have the lowest turnout of any European Union state holding a referendum on the EU constitution, according to research by the Eurobarometer polling agency. Only 19 percent of Czechs surveyed said they would vote. While a quarter of Czechs said they had never heard of the EU constitution, the number who had was - at 67 percent - higher than the average in the nine states due to hold referendums.

Prime Minister Stanislav Gross wants to hold the vote on the same day as the next general elections in 2006. But the opposition Civic Democrats are threatening to try to block the referendum if it is not held by the end of this year.

The former head of the Office of the Government, Pavel Pribyl, is once again working for the Interior Ministry, according to press reports Saturday. Mr Pribyl was forced to resign last year when it emerged that he had led a riot police unit which attacked anti-communist demonstrators in early 1989. A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry said Mr Pribyl had been employed in an external capacity to help improve police standards.

Both the Czech and Slovak authorities have denied reports by the Russian newspaper Novaja Gazeta that a ransom was paid for the release in November of Miriam Jevikova, a Slovak woman who was kidnapped five months earlier while working for a Czech aid agency in Ingushetia. The internet site of the Russian paper said 4.5 million crowns (almost 200,000 US dollars) had been handed over to Ms Jevikova's kidnappers.

The chairman of the Social Democrats, Stanislav Gross, has urged the party to abandon their utopian and populist attitude to the "social state". He told 500 delegates at a conference in Prague the Social Democrats should join the mainstream of European social democracy and not stick dogmatically to what he called "old visions". Meanwhile, members of the party close to the labour minister, Zdenek Skromach, are in favour of maintaining the Social Democrats' traditional socialist values. Mr Skromach will face Mr Gross in a vote for the party leadership in March.

Rent on rent-regulated apartments will rise by a maximum of eight percent a year for the next five or six years, according to the local development minister, Jiri Paroubek. The increases will affect one fifth of flats in the Czech Republic; like free-market rents they will vary in different parts of the country. Mr Paroubek said deregulating rents in one go was impossible because it would threaten social cohesion.

Several Czech MPs are calling for an end to the anonymity enjoyed by people who use pay-as-you-go mobile telephones with pre-paid cards. They say such anonymity makes it harder for the police to monitor criminals, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes reported on Friday. However, around three-quarters of the Czech Republic's mobile phones use unregistered pre-paid cards, and some mobile operators say they do not believe politicians would take the radical step of banning them.

The Czech ice hockey legend Ivan Hlinka was breaking the speed limit when he was involved in a fatal accident last year, according to a report quoted in Friday's Mlada fronta Dnes. Mr Hlinka was going around 160 km an hour when the accident occurred. An earlier judgment in which the driver of the lorry he crashed into was deemed responsible may now be amended or quashed, the daily said.

A special lower house commission says the Czech Republic made several mistakes which led to the country having to pay out ten billion crowns (over 400 million US dollars) in an arbitration case; the Czech state was fined after being found guilty of not protecting the investment of a US company in TV Nova. Commission head Stanislav Krecek said it would be up to the state prosecutor to decide whether any charges were filed in connection with the costly mistakes.

Three Czech women have protested about being featured in a newspaper photograph illustrating a story on growing obesity in Brazil. The New York Times took a photo of the women on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro without their permission, giving the impression they were Brazilians. One of the three, Milena Suchoparkova, who is 59, said she had always been robust but would not describe herself as obese.