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The European Newspaper Publishers’ Association condemned a proposed amendment to the Czech criminal law which would ban the publishing of phone calls intercepted by the police. The Association says freedom of the press in the country would be threatened if the amendment enters into force. The condemnation comes a week after the same bill was criticized by Reporters Without Borders. The amendment, which introduces prison sentences of up to five years for anyone who publishes such interceptions, was approved by the lower house last year but was rejected by the Senate, sending it back to the Chamber of Deputies which is expected to vote on it again this month.

The security situation in Mladá Boleslav, a town north-east of Prague where the Škoda carmaker is based, has improved after most of the factory’s foreign staff left, a municipal police spokesperson said on Monday. In January, the municipal police was called to 25 percent cases less than in the same month of the previous year. Last year, Škoda employed some 7,000 foreign labourers while now only 400 of them remain in town.

DNA testing revealed on Monday that two human arms, found by the German police, belonged to a torso discovered by police last week in western Bohemia. The two countries’ police forces started cooperating on the case after a hunter found a human torso without the head, arms and legs in a forest near Všeruby in western Bohemia, close to the border with Germany, last week. The police disclosed that the dead person was a 35-year-old German man.

The chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee says he believes the United States will never build a radar base in the Czech Republic. Jiří Dientsbier, who was Czechoslovakia’s first post-communist foreign minister, said on Sunday that the Obama administration had indicated it would drop plans for an anti-missile defence shield that would include a radar base in central Bohemia. Speaking on a TV debate programme, he also said US Vice President Joe Biden had always been against the successor to the so-called “Star Wars” programme of the 1980s. Mr Dientsbier said the global financial crisis could make a good pretext for abandoning the project.

Opinion polls have consistently suggested that around two thirds of Czechs are opposed to the planned radar base. Prague and Washington have signed treaties on the radar, though the lower house of the Czech Parliament has not yet voted on the matter.