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The Czech police have handed over two Iraqis arrested on terror charges to their Austrian counterparts. Czech migration police detained the pair at Prague airport a week ago. They are wanted over alleged membership of a terror cell with an Iraqi man arrested in Vienna over unsuccessful train attacks in Germany. Austrian officials said they were suspected of links to Islamic State militants. The pair did not contest their extradition to Austria.

The man arrested in Vienna is accused of carrying out two attacks late last year. In one a high-speed train hit a steel cable stretched across tracks between Nuremberg and Munich.

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports will not support the Czech Republic’s Motorcycle Grand Prix in Brno this year, Czech Television reported. Officials say that the organisers did not fulfill the necessary conditions to receive state funding.

The organisers are already suing the ministry over the fact that last year they received CZK 39 million in funding rather than the CZK 100 million they had applied for.

However, the country’s biggest motorsport event is set to get financial backing from the Ministry of Regional Development this year. Talks are also taking place over funding from the Brno city authority.

The Czech president, Miloš Zeman, emphasised cooperation between the Visegrad Four and Austria in a meeting with his Austrian counterpart, Alexander Van der Bellen, in Vienna on Wednesday. Mr. Zeman said that his host had been neutral on the Czech president’s idea of a new canal linking the Danube, Elbe and Oder rivers.

Mr. Van der Bellen said the Czech Republic was Austria’s most important partner in Central Europe, adding that the two states enjoyed excellent cultural and economic ties. He said his country was concerned about Czech plans to expand the Temelín nuclear power station in south Bohemia.

MP Václav Klaus Jr., who was recently expelled from the Civic Democrats, will remain the chairman of the lower house’s education committee. The committee’s members rejected the party’s nominee to replace Mr. Klaus, Martin Baxa, in a vote on Wednesday.

Under an agreement on the division of posts in the current Chamber of Deputies, the chairmanship of the education committee belongs to the Civic Democrats.

The party’s leader, Petr Fiala, said the situation represented a break with custom in the lower house.

Bark beetle infestations in the Czech Republic are likely to get worse, experts from the Czech Agricultural University said at a news conference. In a report, the scientists said that such infestations have been isolated in the past but would appear in synchronized form on large territories in the future.

The university’s Tomáš Hlásny said intervention would need to be targeted at areas where it could prove effective. In some places harvesting infected trees is not economically efficient, he said.

Seven of the country’s 14 regions are currently suffering infestations. The problem was at its highest level in two centuries last year.

Thursday should be largely bright in the Czech Republic, with temperatures of up to 17 degrees Celsius. Daytime highs in the mid-teens Celsius are also expected in the following days and there will be the chance of rain.

The semi-finals in the playoffs of the Czech ice hockey Extraliga start on Wednesday evening with the opening game between the Liberec White Tigers and Kometa Brno.

The other best-of-seven series pits Třinec against Plzeň and begins on Thursday. Kometa are the reigning champions and all four clubs have lifted the Extraliga title at some point in the last eight seasons.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) has said his cabinet will ask the head of the Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ) to act within his authority and stay out of politics.

The move follows on the office’s issuance on Monday of its 2018 annual report in which the NKÚ took the state administration to task for failing to address societal changes fast enough in a number of areas.

These areas include digitisation, transport infrastructure, the simplification of tax reporting, energy conservation, and building low-income social housing.

The NKÚ is merely supposed to determine whether the government is acting within the law, not offer political commentary, Mr Babiš said.

He claimed no administration in modern Czech history has done as much as his in the areas of digitisation and infrastructure.

The Czech commercial channel TV Prima plans to launch a 24-hour free-to-air news station in conjunction with CNN International Commercial, an arm of the U.S. cable news giant.

The new station, called CNN Prima News, should begin broadcasting within 12 months. One CNN journalist will be on the channel's editorial board.

Apart from licensing CNN content and using its brand, the partnership licence includes extensive consultancy services relating to the launch, ahead of which the entire Prima operation will begin working out of a new building.

J&T Banka analyst Pavel Ryska told the business daily Hospodářské noviny that the project is a continuation of the long-term fragmentation of the local TV market and trend towards narrow casting – that is, targeting well-defined, smaller groups of viewers.

Czech football club Sparta Prague have been poking fun at the English Premier League side Chelsea, which erroneously promoted an upcoming match between the sides.

Chelsea face Slavia Prague in the quarter-finals of the competition, with the first leg away in the Czech Republic a week on Thursday before the second leg at Stamford Bridge a week later.

But the Blues wrongly advertised tickets for a Sparta Prague contest.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Sparta wrote “Hi guys @ChelseaFC, we completely understand you are confused, since we are the most famous and most successful club from Prague. But this time you play against Slavia, sorry.”