News

Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhánek has welcomed the Iraqi government's decision to suspend allflights between Baghdad and Minsk in an attempt to stop illegal immigration of Iraqis to Lithuania. Mr Kulhánek said other countries should also consider restricting flights to Minsk.

In the past few months, Lithuania has faced a surge of mostly Iraqi migrants. It says that’s due to retaliation by Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko after the EU put sanctions on his country over diverting a plane to Minsk and arresting a dissident aboard.

Over 4,000 migrants, mainly from Iraq, have crossed into Lithuania from Belarus Since the start of the year, compared to just around 80 in 2020. Earlier this week, European Council President Charles Michel has condemned the Belarusian regime for using illegal migration as a political tool.

A growing number of Czechs are buying real estate abroad, the Czech News Agency reported on Sunday, citing data from the realestate website Sreality.cz. Between December 2020 and January 2021, the number of inquiries about foreign property investments increased by 62 percent.

Czech clients are buying property mostly in seaside locations. The most popular country is Croatia, where the interest has doubles over the past year, followed by Greece, Italy and Spain. Most clients, over 60 percent, use their foreign property as a holiday home or rent it out during their absence.

Some 50 Jewish monuments around the country will open to the public free of charge on Sunday as part of this year’s  Day of Jewish Monuments. Visitors will be able to see synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other buildings, some of which are normally not accessible.

One of the biggest highlights this year is a newly reconstructed synagogue in the village of Police in South Moravia or the Jerusalem Synagogue in Prague, built in the late 1860s in the Moorish style with Art Nouveau elements.

Some 200 synagogues and 370 Jewish cemeteries have been preserved to this day in the Czech Republic. Around 70 synagogues were destroyed in the country during the Second World War and another 105 were demolished under the post-war Communist regime.

International traffic on the railway line connecting Prague with Munich, which was suspended following a tragic accident earlier this week, will resume on Monday morning, the spokeswoman for Czech Railways told the Czech News Agency.

The railway section was damaged on Wednesday, when an express train traveling from Munich hit a regional passenger train. The accident left three people dead and dozens injured. While the operation of regional trains has already resumed, international German trains are currently replaced by an alternative bus service.