President, on ski trip, outlines candidate he'd prefer

Outgoing Czech President Václav Klaus, while skiing on Thursday, issued an apparent dig against one of the two candidates running to succeed him, Karel Schwarzenberg. Speaking to the Czech news agency and Czech Radio, Mr Klaus said he would prefer to see a candidate elected who "belonged to the country" and had spent his life here in “good times and bad”. The statement was a clear snub of Mr Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister, who grew up and spent much of his life in neighbouring Austria; his parents emigrated with him as a boy after the Communists seized power in 1948. Mr Schwarzenberg, a titled prince, said in an earlier debate he never gave up his Czechoslovak citizenship, even when abroad, and always kept strong ties to his homeland.