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Strong winds with gusts of up to 65 kilometres per hour – enough to snap trees and damage buildings – are due to hit the Czech Republic on Saturday, the Hydrometeorological Institute (ČHMÚ) warns.

Affected areas include much of southern Bohemia, Vysočina, the Pardubice region and parts of the central Bohemian, Hradec Králové and South Moravian regions.

The gusts are expected to last from 2pm to 10pm. During that time, it is best to avoid being outdoors or driving, while windows and loose objects should be secured, the ČHMÚ says.

The Prague Transport Company (DPP) has launched preliminary consultations with potential suppliers of automatic metro control systems for the planned D line and possibly the existing C line.

Automatic operation makes it possible to shorten intervals and respond faster to emergencies. DPP will seek information from eight manufacturers towards setting conditions for a public tender, beginning in July.

Two historic cottages, designated as cultural monuments, burned down in the České Švýcarsko National Park near Rynartice on Friday. Firefighters have declared a third-degree fire alarm.

Dozens of firefighters were taken by helicopter to the site, called Na Tokáni, a popular destination for tourists.

The blaze engulfed the privately owned wooden cottages built in the 1930s. A nearby former Alpine style hunting lodge and cluster of log cabins were undamaged.

The number of coronavirus cases in the Czech Republic rose by 33 on Thursday, which is the lowest number over the past week, according to Czech Health Ministry statistics. 

The number of registered cases has reached 8,754. 306 people have died and 5,962 have recovered from the disease. Around 150 people are hospitalized with Covid-19, some 30 of them are in serious condition.

Another large-scale testing is due to take place at the Darkov mine in Karviná in the Moravian Silesian region this weekend, after an outbreak of Covid-19 cases among the miners.

The virus was first detected last week and by Thursday, the number of cases among the miners and their families has increased to over 150.

Nearly 900 employees of the mine have already been tested and another 1,000 are to be tested this weekend.

The mine is operating as usual but strict hygiene conditions are in place.

The Škoda Auto carmaker has suspended deliveries of its Octavia models due to a malfunctioning eCall software. The system for activating emergency services is mandatory in all cars sold in the EU since the end of March 2018.

Deliveries of the latest generation Golf, which has the same technical base as Octavia, have also been halted.

According to the Škoda Auto spokesperson, Pavel Jína, the company is currently working to fix the problem and will announce next steps as soon as possible. Some reports say that a software update to fix the issue won’t be available until the third week of June.

Archeologists working on a dig in the area around the village of Domašín in North-East Bohemia have found evidence of an Iron Age burial site likely associated with an Urnfield culture settlement found in the nearby village of Černíkovice.

It is the latest in a series of discoveries on the site since the archeological dig began earlier in the Spring of this year. Martina Beková, from the nearby Rychnov Museum, says that the Domašín site is the richest find in the area for the past 10 years.

Over the past two months a number of Czech hospitals have faced cyberattacks. Now a collaboration between investigative journalists at news site Seznam Zprávy and a team of “ethical hackers” has resulted in the identification of one of those who took part in the attack, Seznam wrote on Thursday. The name of the individual is Alexander Tchernishov and his last traced place of activity was in a neighbourhood of northern Moscow.

Mr Tchernishov was contacted by Seznam and has denied the claim, saying that he is merely the owner of a Russian internet company and that the traced IP addresses, which led the hacker team to him, do not belong to his company, but rather to one of its clients who rented them from a third party.

Seznam says it has since found more information which it plans to release in the future.

Nearly 80 percent of Czech start-ups plan to expand abroad, according to a study by Startup Report, carried out in cooperation with the government agency CzechInvest. Around 30 percent of Czech start-ups are currently doing business outside the Czech Republic.

Over 70 percent of Czech start-ups, supported by CzechInvest, took part in foreign acceleration programmes, most of them in Silicon Valley, New York, London and Lisbon.

The study is based on a survey carried out among 150 Czech start-ups between November 2019 and February 2020.

Friday is expected to be sunny to partly cloudy with some rain towards the evening. Daytime temperatures will range between 19 and 23 degrees Celsius.