Czech morning news: Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Police raided several public offices in Prague on Wednesday morning. According to the Czech news server iDnes.cz, this includes Prague City Hall and the city’s transport company. The National Organized Crime Headquarters (NCOZ) confirmed the news without giving further details. Prague City Hall, spokesperson Vít Hofman, told ČTK that the City Hall offers maximum cooperation. Server Seznam Zprávy wrote that the criminal proceedings were taking place in the office of Deputy Mayor Petr Hlubuček.

The Czech Senate should ask the European Council to grant EU candidate status to Ukraine, which has been facing Russian aggression for nearly four months, the chairman of its Committee on European Affairs told reporters yesterday. foreign affairs, Pavel Fischer. The upper house is expected to approve the appeal on Wednesday, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s scheduled address to both chambers of the Czech parliament.

A man who shot his wife and son and killed himself on Monday in Javornice, in the Eastern Bohemia region, was a Czech soldier, a police spokesman told ČTK on Tuesday. The three bodies found in a house in Javornice on Monday belong to a professional Czech army soldier, 31, who shot dead his wife, 32, their four-year-old son, and finally himself, allegedly due to family issues, the spokesperson said. The man, who was also a hunter, did not use his service weapon. The Ministry of Defense has not confirmed that he was one of its soldiers.

The European Council meeting will take place on 22 and 23 June. Because of the unanimous consensus required to grant the country candidate status, the Senate is proposing to relax the criteria. The Senate’s position asserts that the Russian invasion destabilized the European continent and caused the current economic crisis.

Following a similar decision by Google, Apple removed Uloz.to from its App Store. The removal of the file sharing service was based on reports from anti-piracy platform Weemazz 2.0. Jan Karabina, CEO of Uloz.to, told ČTK that the deletion is “an abuse of the process on such platforms in order to damage our data store, which operates in full compliance with Czech and European legislation.” . He said the process for reporting and removing apps from these platforms was not properly regulated.

Families with an annual gross income of less than one million crowns are likely to receive a one-time bonus of CZK 5,000 per child under the age of 18 from August, the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Czech parliament. Opposition proposals to offer repeat bonuses and to widen the age of eligibility were not adopted. The draft amendment has now been sent to the Senate. According to government documents, some 1.56 million children could benefit.

The Rock for People festival kicked off on Tuesday at Hradec Králové airport. Organizers have expected more than 30,000 people to attend the event, which will last until June 18. Tickets for four days are already sold out and the only way to attend the festival is to purchase a one-day ticket. According to festival organizers, the 26th year of the festival marks a turning point, with the event’s budget exceeding CZK 100 for the first time.

In the first month since its opening, 45,000 people crossed the longest suspension bridge in the world, Sky Bridge 721, in Dolní Moravia. The number of visitors thus exceeded the investor’s expectations. Thanks to massive promotion, including CzechTourism, the bridge attracts tourists from all over the world, Czechs, Poles, Dutch, Germans and Englishmen came to brave the bridge. The bridge opened on May 13. It has an altitude of 95 meters, with a length of 721 meters.

A tornado reaching around 150 km / h hit the town of Břeclav in South Moravia on Monday evening, the Czech Institute of Hydrometeorology announced on Tuesday. The disaster damaged around 30 houses in Lanžhot, but the level of damage has not yet been calculated. Firefighters intervened in more than 40 cases in the Břeclav region and in almost 60 in the whole region due to extreme weather conditions last night. Officials say the uprooting of trees in the area and other damage indicate a tornado of that speed.

Traffic data showed that after the start of the renovation of the Barrandov Bridge, traffic in Prague has changed little, and although an increase in traffic has been recorded in some places, this is l of a few minutes even at peak times compared to the usual situation. . Of the places monitored, the Komořanská road shows the greatest increase in driving time, where the average delay is about five minutes higher than in peak hours before the start of reconstruction.

The Bratislava Regional Court dismissed the case of former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, saying he had been registered as the former agent of the Czechoslovak communist secret police (StB) in their files wrongly, as part of proceedings reopened today. In line with the previous ruling of the Slovak Constitutional Court, the regional court argued that the lawsuit should have been aimed at the Slovak Ministry of Interior and not the Institute of National Remembrance (ÚPN) in Slovakia. Babiš has repeatedly denied collaborating with the StB.

The number of disinformation websites focusing primarily on pro-Kremlin and Covid propaganda fell from six to 46 in Czechia last year, but the number of articles published by these sites, 195,238, was almost the same as in 2020, according to the European Values ​​Center for Security Policy announced today in its annual report. The center said it expects a further increase in activity as these websites were until recently blocked for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last year, the design and content of the website became more sophisticated and direct communication with readers intensified, the center said.

The city’s economy in the first quarter of this year ended with a surplus of 4.4 billion Czech crowns, approximately the same year. Revenues reached approximately CZK 24.65 billion and expenses approximately CZK 20.2 billion. The city spent more than CZK 2 billion on investments, slightly more than last year. The majority of expenses were current expenses, which amounted to approximately CZK 18.2 billion. Capital expenditure exceeded CZK 2.1 billion in the first quarter. The city invested the most money, some CZK 513 million, in transport. For this year, the capital has an approved budget with income and expenditure of CZK 92.6 billion, which is more year-on-year.