News | All stories

The Prague department store Kotva has definitively secured protected status. There were no objections to a previous Ministry of Culture decision to that effect and it became legally binding at the end of April. Earlier this year Kotva briefly lost its protected status following a challenge from the building’s current owner.

The Brutalist structure was designed by the architects Věra and Vladimír Machonin and completed in the mid-1970s.

The Czech Republic is lacking around 100,000 blood donors, iDnes.cz reported on Tuesday. While existing donors are getting older, fewer new ones are coming forward every year, the news site said. Experts say commercial blood donation has also been contributing to the problem.

Transfusion centres say that the biggest shortage of blood occurs in the summer months, when the number of accidents increases at the same time as many donors are away.

The country’s postal service, Czech Post, lost money in 2018 for the first time in its history. Whereas the state enterprise turned a profit of CZK 91 million in 2017, last year it went CZK 275 million into the red. However, total losses excluding the amount it received from the state for providing its services reached over CZK 1 billion.

Czech Post falls under the Ministry of the Interior and Minister Jan Hamáček said the state has been underpaying for such services for some years. His view is shared by the postal service’s CEO, Roman Knap. He also said that restructuralisation would lead to the organisation again making a profit in 2022.

It should be overcast with some rain in the Czech Republic on Wednesday, with temperatures of up to 8 degrees Celsius. Daytime highs are expected to reach up to 23 degrees Celsius at the weekend, when sunny spells are due.

The group Lake Malawi will represent the Czech Republic in the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, performing the song Friend of a Friend. If they do well, singer-songwriter Albert Černý’s band will qualify for Saturday’s final.

Last year Mikolas Josef achieved the best ever result for a Czech entrant in Eurovision when he came sixth in the final.

The Czech Republic lost 3:0 to Russia at the World Ice Hockey Championships in Slovakia on Monday evening. Coach Miloš Říha’s team had scored 12 goals in their first two games in the tournament, in which they beat Sweden and Norway, but were unable to continue that run in their third match in Group B against the still undefeated Russians. The Czechs’ next game is against Latvia on Thursday evening.

The 18th International Contemporary Art Fair Art Prague opens in the Czech capital on Tuesday. The collection showcases works by 230 Czech and foreign artists from all fields of contemporary art: painting, drawing, graphic art, sculpture, art glass creations and video projections.

The art fair was organized with the help of 38 galleries and studios who lent selected items. The six-day event includes lectures, debates and meetings with the artists.

Traditionally, one exhibiting artist under the age of 35 will receive the Art Prague Young Award.

Czech President Miloš Zeman left for a three-day official visit to Hungary on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday he will be received with military honours by his Hungarian counterpart President Janos Ader and meet for talks with Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Speaker of Parliament Laszlo Kovar.

The Czech head of state, who is accompanied by a sizeable delegation of Czech business leaders, will also inspect the Paks nuclear power plant, for which Russia’s Rosatom is to build two new units.

President Zeman has advocated "the Hungarian path" in the completion of nuclear blocks in the Czech Republic.

The government on Monday approved another loan of crude oil from the country’s state material reserves to the oil refinery in Litvinov. It is the second loan since Russian crude oil deliveries via the Družba pipeline were suspended on April 25th due to contamination of the oil with high levels of organic chloride.

According to Pavel Švagr, head of the Administration of State Material Reserves, the second loan should cover the refinery’s needs until the end of May. Deliveries of Russian crude oil could be renewed by May 25.

Tuesday should be partly cloudy to overcast with scattered showers and day temperatures between 8 and 12 degrees Celsius.