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The Czech prime minister has expressed reservations about plans to build a centre in Berlin dedicated to the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from eastern European states after the war. When asked if he and Donald Tusk had reservations about the idea, Mr Topolánek simply replied, yes. For his part, the Polish prime minister said his country would remain opposed unless current German government plans for the centre were amended.

The late Czech-born industrialist Jan Antonin Bata has been cleared definitively of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1947 a Czechoslovak court found Bata guilty in absentia of failing to join the anti-Nazi resistance. That judgment was overturned by a Prague court earlier this year, when the file was handed over to the state attorney’s office; it said on Thursday it was shelving the matter, as no crime had been committed.

Jan Antonin Bata was the step-brother of Tomas Bata, founder of the shoe empire of the same name. After fleeing the Nazis, he settled in Brazil, where he established a number of towns.

US Ambassador Richard Graber presented the National Film Archives director on Friday with unique footage shot by American soldiers in western Bohemia right after the end of the war. The footage, which had not been seen in the country before, will be identified, analyzed, and publicly screened in the very places where they were filmed.

Two Airbus planes bought by the Czech army are to be named after World War II heroes, the Defence Ministry has announced. The aircraft will be named after Josef Ocelka, who flew in Britain's RAF, and Karel Janousek, who fought in the resistance in the two world wars and set up a Czechoslovak unit in the RAF during the second. President Vaclav Klaus is set to take part in the official launch of the Airbus A 319 CJ planes at Prague's Kbely military airport next Friday.

The city of Brno has raised a memorial to US pilot William Kiggins who was shot down over the city 63 years ago. The monument has the shape of a wing of his P-51 Mustang aircraft whose parts were discovered five months ago two metres underground in one of the city's districts. William Kiggins' fighter plane was shot down on October 11, 1944 by German antiaircraft artillery and "Miss Betty", as he affectionately called his aircraft, crashed in a field. A local woman who remembers the crash helped identify the exact spot where the remnants of the aircraft were eventually discovered. The local authorities are planning to put them on display at an airport in Brno.

It was 69 years ago this week, just after midnight on the night from 29th to 30th September 1938, that the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, his French counterpart, Edouard Daladier, Hitler and Mussolini, signed the Munich Agreement. It is now remembered as the most notorious symbol of Chamberlain's tragically flawed policy of appeasement. The "piece of paper" which he waved on his return to Heston Aerodrome, just west of London, was to be a guarantee of "peace for our time", and Czechoslovakia was the price that was to be paid, as the

Police in the German city of Stuttgart are investigating two men accused of taking part in a massacre of Czech citizens at the end of World War II, TV Nova reported. The two are alleged to have been members of the Hitler Youth when they participated in the killing of 63 Czechs in Velke Mezirici, just one day before the war in Europe was officially ended. Both men are now aged 77.

This week in Mailbox: the village of Lidice in Central Bohemia, where is the Red River Valley mentioned in a song featured in SoundCzech, a restoration project discussed in Insight Central Europe, and what colour is the red squirrel? Listeners quoted: Elizabeth Funnekotter, Charles Chambers, Dick Derksen, Aloisie Krasny, Paul Kail.

The Czech Foreign Ministry has condemned damage done to the graves of Soviet soldiers at Prague's Olsany graveyard. The Russian Foreign Ministry lodged a protest earlier this week after it emerged that bronze reliefs had been removed from the headstones of Russian soldiers who were killed in Prague during World War II. Prague reiterated its commitment to treaties with Moscow on the mutual maintenance of war graves.

Moscow has sent the Czech government a protest note over alleged vandalism of Russian war graves at the Olsany cemetery in Prague. A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Prague said that the bronze decorations on the graves of 48 World War Two Red Army soldiers had been removed, in what he said was the third case of vandalism of Russian war graves since May of this year. The embassy said it expected the offenders to be punished and the graves restored to their original state. The incident comes a few weeks after the Russian consulate denounced the removal of a hammer and sickle from a war memorial to Red Army soldiers in Brno.