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The Czech Republic's foreign debt grew by 45.3 billion crowns to over 2,02 billion in the second quarter of this year, accounting for 53.1 percent of gross domestic product, the Czech National Bank said on Monday. Year on year, the foreign debt was 97.5 billion crowns higher. Foreign liabilities with an original maturity of more than one year accounted for 74.6 percent of debt liabilities. External liabilities of the corporate sector accounted for 48.7 percent of the total external debt. The private sector is responsible for 46.1 percent of the long-term external debt, while public sector liabilities account for the rest.

The two strongest parties of the former centre-right government coalition have lost approximately one million voters since the last general elections in 2010, according to a comparative analysis of opinion surveys conducted by the Factum Invenio polling agency. According to the results half a million former Civic Democrat voters have changed allegiance in favour of Andrej Babis’ ANO 2011 party and others will vote instead for the Christian Democrats and Tomio Okamura’s Dawn of Direct Democracy. TOP 09 stands to lose around 240,000 former supporters in favour of left-wing parties, due to dissatisfaction with the former government’s austerity measures.

Monday is the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Munich Agreement allowing the Nazis to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, border areas chiefly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The deal was agreed on September 29 1938 but actually signed in the early hours of September 30 by the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and Italy. Czechoslovakia was not represented at the talks and considered the deal a betrayal on the part of its nominal allies the UK and France. Six months later the Nazis took over the whole of Bohemia and Moravia.

A 34-year-old postal service worker in the Brno area has been charged with fraud. The woman allegedly abused the trust of senior citizens, signed their pension slips and took their money. In order to deflate suspicion she originally covered her own needs from their pensions and paid them back later when she received her own salary, but later claimed the money had simply not arrived. If convicted she could face up to two years in jail.