News

The heavily favoured Czech national football side has won its opening match at the Euro 2004 football tournament in Portugal. Despite concentrated pressure by Czech players inlcuding Karel Poborsky, Milan Baros, and Pavel Nedved in the first half, Latvia scored just before half-time on a beautiful cross by Blagonadezdins to Verpakovskis. He tapped the ball easily into the open net.

Latvia then led 1-0 well into the 2nd before Czech striker Milan Baros scored in the 73rd minute to put his side back in the game. Marek Heinz then added a 2nd in the 85th to put the Czechs ahead for good.

Czech Defence Minister Miroslav Kostelka and his Swedish counterpart have signed a contract finalising the Czech decision to lease Gripen fighters from Sweden to replace its aging fleet of MiG-21s. The cost of the ten-year lease will be 19.6 billion crowns. As part of the deal, Sweden has committed itself to investing 130 percent of the contract's cost in the Czech Republic, 20 percent of which will be direct investments into the Czech economy. A multi-purpose simulator, a mission planning system, complete technical equipment for the jets and training for both pilots and ground personnel is all included in the deal.

A former commander of a Nazi German army unit charged with the murder of 164 people at the end of World War II worked as a double agent for the United States, writes Focus magazine. Quoting CIA documents, the weekly reports in its latest edition that Ladislav Niznansky worked as a double agent for the CIA just after he was recruited by the Czechoslovak Secret Service in 1947 to keep tabs on the communist opposition in Austria. According to Focus magazine, he supplied the CIA with codenames, the addresses of safe houses and helped turn in agents. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1962 by a Czech court. Niznansky, who obtained German citizenship in 1996 and is now 86 years old, was arrested in January after a probe by Czech and Slovak officials and is now in custody in Munich, southern Germany.

Exit polls for the Czech Republic's first ever European parliamentary elections suggest a comfortable victory for the country's eurosceptic parties. According to the estimates released shortly after voting ended on Saturday, the right-of-centre opposition Civic Democrats won 31 percent of the vote, the largely unreconstructed opposition Communists 17 percent, and Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla's ruling Social Democratic party finished in third place with just 10.5 percent. They are closely followed by the strongly pro-EU European Democrats with 10 percent and the Independents with 8.5 percent of the vote. If the exit polls are confirmed by the final results, which are expected to come in early on Monday morning, the Civic Democrats would gain nine of the country's 24 seats in parliament; the Communists would obtain five seats, and the Social Democrats three seats. The exit polls were carried out for Czech Television by the SC&C agency.

The preliminary estimates also suggest that less than one in three voters bothered to cast ballots in the Czech Republic. For political commentator Bohumil Dolezal, the low voter turnout came as no surprise as Czechs no longer find elections to be exciting and new as was the case in the years after the fall of Communism. Today, he says, the enthusiasm is rapidly wearing off as people are getting fed up.