News

Production in Unipetrol’s Litvínov refinery in North Bohemia was shut down after an unexploded World War II-era bomb was discovered during excavation work in a remote section of the complex on Wednesday.

The refinery is expected to resume operations once the unexploded bomb is safely removed from the site, a process that the police estimate will be completed no earlier than Wednesday, 28 August.

Pyrotechnicians identified the find as a 250-kg British aerial bomb designed to explode 144 hours after the impact. Following the discovery, police evacuated 582 workers from the site and temporarily closed the main road between Litvínov and Most.

Czech senators have rejected the proposal to mark the Day of Samizdat on October 12, as it was approved by the lower house of Parliament earlier this year. According to the Senate, the day celebrating the production of illicit printed materials under the pre-1989 Communist regime should fall on April 27, which marks the anniversary of the founding of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1978.

An amendment tabled by a group of coalition MPs proposed to celebrate the history of Samizdat on October 12, when a group of 92 Czech and Slovak samizdat publishers wrote an open letter to the then Communist president Gustáv Husák in 1988 condemning the jailing of a colleague.

The Ministry of Finance has downgraded its growth forecast for this year, predicting that GDP will increase by 1.1 percent. In April, the ministry predicted a growth of 1.4 percent. According to Finance Minister Zbyněk Stanjura, the deterioration in the outlook is due to a revision of GDP data from previous years, carried out by the Czech Statistics Office.

The ministry expects the Czech economy to see a stronger recovery next year, with GDP growing by 2.7 percent. Growth will be driven mainly by household consumption, which will grow by 3.9 percent, according to the forecast.

The Senate has criticized the newly-digitized system of construction permits arguing that it has fundamental flaws and the issue needs to be addressed before it causes irreparable damage. The upper chamber on Wednesday passed a resolution saying that the Ministry of Regional Development, which is responsible for the bungled system, should get a crisis manager and establish a working group with representatives of building authorities and the Chamber of Architects so as to resolve the persistent problems. In the course of the three-hour debate, senators warned of dire economic consequences, including a mass exodus of civil servants from the sector and possible lawsuits against the state for delays in construction due to the inability to process construction permits. The head of the Czech Chamber of Architects, Jan Kasl, said that he welcomed the Senate's stand.