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Some 45 percent of Czechs support gay couples’ right to marry, according to a poll by the CVVM agency released on Friday. Around 73 percent of those surveyed said they were in favour of gay people’s registered partnership. The share of those supporting gay marriage has decreased by six percentage points since the previous poll conducted last year, the agency said. Meanwhile, some 45 percent of people in the Czech Republic believe gays should be able to adopt children, an idea opposed by 48 percent of those who took part in the poll.

Sixteen Czech firms have presented their bids for licences to grow and sell medical marihuana to pharmacies, the State Institute for Drug Control said on Friday. In the first phase of the two-round tender, the institute will review technical conditions while price will be the decisive factor in the second round. The winner will receive a licence to supply 40 kilos of medical marihuana. The drug is now legally imported from the Netherlands but no patients have been prescribed medical marihuana so far due to issues with prescription procedures, the news agency ČTK reported.

The police have arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made a threating phone call to Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitová, a police spokeswoman said on Friday. The man reportedly made the phone call on Thursday, cursed at the tennis player and threatened her with physical violence and death. The tennis player alerted the police who arrested the man several hours later. The man’s motivation remains unclear. If convicted, he could face up to three years in prison.

A special tax-evasion unit set up by the Czech Finance Ministry, has uncovered fraud worth 270 million crowns, the head of the Czech Tax Administration, Jiří Žežulka told reporters. Four men have been charged with tax evasion in the case; the men allegedly carried out fictitious sales of technology to offshore firms, and then applied for VAT reimbursement. The alleged fraud is the first case uncovered by the special unit, dubbed Kobra which was set up earlier this year and includes experts from the tax and customs administration and the police.

An audit at government ministries run by the Social Democrats has discovered suspicious deals worth around two billion crowns, Prime Minister and Social Democrat leader Bohuslav Sobotka told a news conference on Friday. Around half of the potentially wasted funds is related to several problematic IT deals of the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry. Mr Sobotka said the situation in the state administration was worse than expected, and blamed the problems on past Czech governments. The prime minister and his team has reviewed four ministries controlled by the Social Democrats; Mr Sobotka said that audits would continue. A review of six ministries controlled by the ANO party earlier this year found suspicious deals worth 16 billion crowns.

Czech trade unions have threatened to stage protests if public employees are not granted a 3.5 percent pay rise next year. The Czech centre-left government has promised to increase salaries in the public sector by 3.5 percent in 2015 but union leaders say the rise is not planned for all public workers. The head of the Czech trade union association, Josef Středula, said they would raise the issue with government officials by the end of July and in early September when draft state budget for next year is to be finalized. If their demands are not met, they are ready to launch protests in the following months, Mr Středula said.

The Temelín nuclear power plant has been taken off the grid after one of its reactors experienced problems with one of the pumps in plant’s first water circuit, a spokesman for the plant said. The reactor was taken off the grid on Thursday night. The plant’s other reactor was shut down in June due planned flue replacement. The plant’s operator, the state-run firm ČEZ, said the shutdown would not affect customers as the firm has replaced Temelín’s output with electricity from other sources.

Some 200 trains running on a major railway route between Prague and Kolín are facing delays on Friday over a faulty power line, a spokesman for the country’s Railway Infrastructure Administration said. The incident has affected a number of connections between the capital and major cities in eastern Czech Republic including Brno, Břeclav, Olomouc and Ostrava. Several trains have been cancelled while express trains are being diverted to an alternate route. The authorities expect the power line will be fixed by 6 PM on Friday.

The Czech Republic could lose up to 65 billion crowns in EU subsidies earmarked for the country in the financial period 2007-2013, according to a report by the country’s Supreme Audit Office released on Friday. The office said that by the end of last year, funds had been released to finance projects worth 395 billion crowns, which represents only some 54 percent of all available funds. The share increased to 57 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2014; however, the country could lose the funds due to slow processing of the projects as well as errors made in choosing projects to get EU funding, the head of the office said.

Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitová has come under fire from left leaning Czech politicians for the fact that she has declared her official residence to be the tax haven of Monaco and does not pay taxes in her home country. In a Facebook comment, Social Democrat member of parliament Stanislav Huml suggested that Kvitová lose her Czech citizenship because of the tax move, reportedly carried out at the end of October last year. Parliamentary colleague and head of the Budget Committee Václav Votova suggested that Kvitová no longer play for her country. Most Czech tennis stars are now based in Monaco.