News

Czech women’s national basketball team beat Japan 66 :60 in Brno on Saturday, and secured the second place in Group D at the world championship hosted by the Czech Republic. The Czechs built up a comfortable lead of 17 points by the end of the third quarter, but made serious mistakes in the final part and allowed the Japanese to bring the difference down to four points with three minutes to go. Czech forward Jana Veselá then converted two penalty shots and set the final score. The Czechs secured second place in their group and advanced to the round of eight, where they will next face Korea.

Czech tennis player Petra Zakopalová lost to Russia’s Alisa Klebanova 1:6 and 3:6 in the final of the Korean Open on Saturday. The ninth-seeded Czech lost her service six times in the final; the fifth-seeded Russian was leading 5-0 in the first set when Zakopalová scored her first game. In the second set, the 28-year-old Czech was leading 3-1 but failed to score any more games after that. After the final, Zakopalová said her opponent was more aggressive and deserved to win.

In related news, the opposition Social Democrats held a party conference in the Moravian city of Olomouc on Saturday. The conference focused on reshaping the party’s policies following May’s general elections, which the party won but was unable to form a government. The acting Social Democrat chair, Bohuslav Sobotka, said the party needed to form a credible alternative to the right-of-centre government which he criticized for massive budget cuts. Mr Sobotka admitted that budget deficits were “the biggest enemy of welfare state” but his party should come up with sophisticated and well though-out austerity measures.

The Czech opt-out from the EU’s Lisbon treaty, demanded by President Klaus in return for the document’s ratification, is under threat, the daily Lidové noviny reported on Saturday. The opt-out is supposed to be ratified as part of the EU’s accession treaty with Croatia. The paper said however that the EU is now considering excluding it from the accession treaty, and start its ratification process independently. In such case, the Czech opt-out would most likely be rejected by a number of EU member states.

Václav Klaus refused last year to finalize the Lisbon treaty’s ratification process unless an opt-out form the Charter of Fundamental Rights is granted to the Czech Republic. The opt-out should shield the country from possible restitution demands by ethnic Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after the end of the Second World War.