News

Unemployment in Czechia fell month-on-month by 0.2 percentage points to 3.7 percent in April, according to data released by the national Labour Office on Friday.

At the end of last month some 280,000 people in the country were out of work. The number of vacant positions dropped slightly, reaching just over 268,000. The decrease was mainly due to the start of seasonal work.

The unemployment rate in Czechia in April last year was 3.2 percent.

Prime Minister Petr Fiala is going to propose the appointment of Marek Ženíšek as the new Minister for Science, Research and Innovation to President Petr Pavel on Friday. The prime minister described him as an experienced politician who will be an asset to the government.

After meeting with Mr. Fiala on Friday morning, Mr. Ženíšek said that they had agreed on priorities for this election period and on increasing the budget in the field of science to prevent brain drain. The candidate for minister also said he is preparing for a meeting with the president on Tuesday.

The post of science and research minister was previously held by TOP 09's Helena Langšádlová, who resigned after her party criticised her for lack of communication and failure to sell her work to the public. Economist Pavel Tuleja was initally slated to take over her role but gave up his candidacy last Friday after it emerged that he had published poor-quality academic articles in pay-to-publish journals.

Ženíšek's nomination was approved by the leadership of his party, government coalition partners TOP 09, on Thursday.

The most commonly cited reason for Czechs to participate in the upcoming European Parliament elections in June is to express their opinion on the current government, a survey by the Ipsos agency for ČTK Connect has found. More survey respondents said they would vote in the EP elections for this reason than said they would to influence the direction and content of European Union policy.

According to the survey, roughly six out of ten Czechs are interested in the EP elections and around a third of eligible voters are planning to go to the polls on June 7 and 8.

Over 9,000 reports have been filed by schoolchildren via the application 'Nenech to být' or 'Don't Let It Be', about half of which concern bullying, the platform announced in a press release on Thursday. The other 50 percent are related to learning difficulties (10 percent), problems at home (10 percent), and the remaining 30 percent fall into the "other" category.

The app was invented in 2017 by three high school students from Brno, functioning as an online trust box through which students can contact their schools about anything concerning them or their classmates. In the seven years that the app has been around, 2,050 of Czechia's 4,276 primary and 1,304 secondary schools have joined the platform, and it is also used by schools in the USA, Germany, Slovakia, Finland and Norway.