News

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has released a list of the 35 works in progress that are set to feature in the Eastern Promises presentation at this year’s edition. It will include several uncompleted works by Ukrainian directors as part of cooperation with the Odessa International Film Festival, which cannot take place due to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The projects that are rated most highly by an international jury will receive a total of EUR 125,000 in support, Karlovy Vary’s organisers said. The festival begins on July 1.

The Czech Republic needs to pay EUR 3.3 million (more than CZK 85 million) for mistakes that were committed in the country’s agricultural funding policy, Czech Radio reported on Monday, citing a document published by the European Commission last week. The fee includes a CZK 1.1 million sanction for former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s conflict of interest, the spokeswoman of the State Agricultural Intervention Fund Luďka Raimondová told Czech Radio.

The fine is the result of an audit into the conflict of interest of Mr Babiš which took place at the begging of 2019, when he was still prime minister.

The Czech state could issue a law suit against the decision at the European Court of Justice. Ms Raimondová told Czech Radio that several scenarios of how the state could proceed have been prepared by the State Agricultural Intervention Fund and that it is now waiting on a decision which of these options to take.

The Czech Republic saw its population increase by 3,200 people to a total of 10.52 million during the first quarter of 2022 based on preliminary results published by the Czech Statistics Agency on Monday. The population growth was caused by immigration from abroad.

Refugees arriving in the country as a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were not counted into the statistic. According to state data, 250,000 refugees arrived in the Czech Republic as a consequence of the event.

The first three months of 2022 saw 24,200 births and 31,900 deaths. The number of deceased went down roughly by a third when compared with the years during the coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, deaths were slightly higher than in the years before Covid-19, something that statisticians believe is caused by the large 1940s generation entering old age.

The deputy chairman of the Mayors and Independents party and the long-term mayor of the Central Bohemian village of Dolní Břežany, Věslav Michalik, died at the age of 59 on Sunday, party Chairman Vít Rakušan has announced. News site Neovlivní.cz reports that the death occurred suddenly while Mr Michalik was holidaying in the mountains.

Věslav Michalik was flouted as the candidate for the position of Minister of Industry and Trade after last year’s elections into the Chamber of Deputies, but he renounced the nomination after suggestions of a possible conflict of interest, caused by his business activity, occurred in the media.

A mayor of Dolní Břežany for 18 years, Mr Michalik studied at the Czech Technical University’s Faculty of Nuclear Physics before going on to work in the Czech Academy of Sciences. He later switched to the financial sector before becoming Dolní Břežany’s mayor in 2004.

He was a member of the Mayors and Independents party since 2013 and soon became a member of the party leadership. He served as its deputy chairman from August 2021 until his death.

Vít Rakušan wrote on twitter after his colleague’s death that Michalik was a “great mayor and a good friend”.