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After a short overnight break, MPs resumed the second reading of the postal vote bill for Czechs living abroad on Friday. The first day of the debate on Thursday went on for 14 hours, only stopping for the night at 1am due to filibustering by the opposition. Friday is expected to be no different, as around 20 MPs are still registered to speak.
The coalition government wants the bill passed before the next parliamentary elections in autumn 2025, saying it would strengthen Czech citizens' right to vote by providing them with more options. However, the opposition fears that votes could be manipulated or interefered with if sent by mail. Radek Vondráček from the opposition ANO party told Czech Television that they plan to use all the legal instruments available to prevent the proposal from being passed before next fall.
Czech police on Friday announced a manhunt for Russian intelligence general Andrei Averyanov, whose unit is suspected of blowing up arms stores in Vrbětice eight years ago, killing two people and causing major material damage, the Czech News Agency has reported.
Two agents believed to have carried out the attack, Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin from Russia’s military intelligence service GRU, are still at large. The pair are also believed to have carried out the Novichok attack on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the UK.
Czechia fully supports the Montenegrin government in its efforts to make progress in EU accession talks, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said after meeting his counterpart Filip Ivanovic at the Czernin Palace on Friday. According to Mr. Lipavský, Montenegro is a Czech ally in NATO and an important partner in the Western Balkans region.Apart from discussing Montenegro’s EU accession process, the two ministers also spoke about strengthening mutual economic cooperation, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the political situation in the Western Balkans.
Prime Minister Petr Fiala is going to propose the appointment of Marek Ženíšek as the new Minister for Science, Research and Innovation to President Petr Pavel on Friday. The prime minister described him as an experienced politician who will be an asset to the government.
After meeting with Mr. Fiala on Friday morning, Mr. Ženíšek said that they had agreed on priorities for this election period and on increasing the budget in the field of science to prevent brain drain. The candidate for minister also said he is preparing for a meeting with the president on Tuesday.
The post of science and research minister was previously held by TOP 09's Helena Langšádlová, who resigned after her party criticised her for lack of communication and failure to sell her work to the public. Economist Pavel Tuleja was initally slated to take over her role but gave up his candidacy last Friday after it emerged that he had published poor-quality academic articles in pay-to-publish journals.
Ženíšek's nomination was approved by the leadership of his party, government coalition partners TOP 09, on Thursday.
Unemployment in Czechia fell month-on-month by 0.2 percentage points to 3.7 percent in April, according to data released by the national Labour Office on Friday.
At the end of last month some 280,000 people in the country were out of work. The number of vacant positions dropped slightly, reaching just over 268,000. The decrease was mainly due to the start of seasonal work.
The unemployment rate in Czechia in April last year was 3.2 percent.
Some 4.1 million tourists stayed in hotels, guesthouses and campsites in Czechia in the first quarter of 2024, representing a year-on-year rise of 9.9 percent, according to data released by the Czech Statistics Office on Friday.
Approximately 2.2 million of the overall number of tourists were domestic guests. Overall, tourists spent a total 10.6 million nights in accommodation establishments between January and March, 7.7 percent more than in the same period last year.
The largest group of foreign guests, nearly half a million, came from Germany, followed by Slovakia and Poland.
Tourism has been rising continuously since the second quarter of 2021 and tourist numbers have already surpassed the pre-Covid year of 2019.
The 2024 Ice Hockey World Championships get underway on Friday in Prague and Ostrava. The tournament, which includes 16 teams, will run over the course of two weeks and is expected to attract over a hundred thousand hockey fans to Czechia.
Teams will play games in two venues, Prague’s O2 Arena and the Ostravar Arena in the Moravian-Silesian capital. Fans can also watch the best of the games on a big screen outside the stadiums. Access to the fan zones is free of charge.
The championships kick off at Prague’s O2 Arena at 4.20pm with a match between Switzerland and Norway. At the same time, Slovakia will face Germany in Ostrava. Czechs will play their first match against Finland at 8.20pm in Prague.
People in Czechia may be able to observe the aurora borealis, or northern lights, this weekend, due to a severe geomagnetic storm, astronomer Petr Horálek from the Institute of Physics in Opava told the Czech News Agency. The lights should be visible on both Friday and Saturday night, he said. The northern lights were also seen in Czechia on Monday night.
Czech singer Aiko has failed to reach the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. The 24-year-old’s song Pedestal was not among the 10 chosen to go through from the semi-final in the Swedish city of Malmö on Thursday night.
No Czech artist has ever won Eurovision. The most successful contestant so far was singer Mikolas Josef, who took sixth place in 2018.
Saturday should be sunny to partly cloudy with day temperatures ranging between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius.
What really happens to your plastic after you’ve carefully sorted it and put it in your local recycling container (in Czechia, those iconic yellow bins)? According to many recent media reports, rather than being recycled, it likely ends up in landfill, an incinerator, or even worse, in the ocean or dumped in a field, as most of the plastic that people put in recycling containers is unusable using current recycling methods. But a new technology currently being tested in Czechia may provide hope of a solution.
Jane Goodall, the famous English primatologist and anthropologist who has spent decades studying chimpanzees, is paying a special visit to the Prague Zoo this weekend. Goodall will be naming one of the Zoo’s new baby gorillas, a special event which spokesman for the Prague Zoo Filip Mašek told me more about.
There is no doubt that one of the pivotal moments in Czech history I just mentioned came twenty years ago when this country joined the European Union.
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