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Czech tennis player Karolína Muchová  advanced to her first WTA 1000 final in Cincinnati after defeating world number two Aryna Sabalenko from Belarus 6:7 (4:7), 6:3, 6:2 in Saturday's semifinals.  In Sunday's battle for the title, the Czech player will face Coco Gauff, who defeated world number one Iga Šwiatek from Poland.

The civic organisations Team4Ukraine and Gift for Putin have launched a new collection for Ukraine, on the eve of the 55th anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led troops. The collection is being promoted by a spot that uses an analogy with the 1968 invasion. Within hours of the collection’s launch people had donated hundreds of thousands of crowns. The money will be used to buy drones, night vision devices, anti-tank weapons and even equipment for a field hospital. Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops on August 21, 1968 with the aim of crushing democratic reforms in the country.

Over 500 Czech Romany women are still waiting for the authorities to decide about their claim for compensation for having undergone forced sterilization under the communist regime, Czech Television reported. A bill on providing compensation for women who were forcibly or otherwise illegally sterilized in the years 1966 to 2012 was approved by Parliament in 2021, but the process of paying out compensation is complicated by a lack of medical documentation in many of these cases. A court recently ruled that the authorities should accept other kinds of proof, for example the testimony of witnesses, but progress on this has been slow. The ministry received over 1,100 applications of which around 600 have been processed, over four hundred in the affirmative.

Coalition party leaders of TOP 09, the Pirate Party, Christian Democrats and Mayors and Independents say they will demand a further explanation from Justice Minister Pavel Blažek of the Civic Democrats as to why he spent five hours in a Prague restaurant in the company of Martin Nejedlý, a controversial advisor to the former president Miloš Zeman, who was believed to have close ties with Russia. Mr. Blažek said earlier that the meeting, which was reported on by Seznam Zprávy, was unplanned and he had ducked into the restaurant to take cover from a heavy storm. The Civic Democratic Party’s coalition partners say they consider the meeting extremely inappropriate and fear it will damage the image of the entire government.