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The head of the national public broadcaster Czech Television Petr Dvořák is ringing alarm bells over the station’s future and the quality of broadcasting. In an interview for the financial daily Hospodářské noviny, Dvořák said politicians must either agree to raise license fees or allow more advertising if the quality of programming is to be maintained. He said that even an in-depth audit into the station’s finances had not found a way to save hundreds of millions of crowns a year. Czech Television has had to cut spending by almost a billion crowns, it is laying off employees and will be forced to close down the CT3 channel which was set up specially for senior viewers.

Public trust in the police and army is on the rise, according to the results of a poll conducted by the CVVM agency. Trust in the police is now at 79 percent and 73 percent of Czechs trust the country’s armed forces. Trust in the police is up by nine percentage points since last August, which is the highest level since 1994, according to the authors of the survey. In the case of the army, confidence has risen by four percentage points, returning to its 2020 level. Trust in both these institutions has been growing slowly but steadily since the fall of communism when it was near non-existent.

Czech higher education institutions dropped in this year’s annual international ranking of universities carried out by the British company Quacquarelli Symonds. Out of the 16 universities ranked, four declined, nine remained at the same level and one appeared in the ranking for the first time.

The only two institutions to improve their positions this year was the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) and Higher Chemical-Technical School (VŠCHT). As in previous years, Charles University in Prague placed highest nationally, but it dropped from 266th to 280th place.

The rankings are based on six criteria: reputation among other universities and employers, citations of authors, internationalization of academia, numbers of foreign students, and average number of students per teacher.

The National Museum has brought 20 rare collection items from Syria to the Czech Republic for restoration. The artefacts, dating back to the Bronze Age and Antiquity, were transported from Damascus with the help of the Czech Army, the National Museum’s director Michal Lukeš said on Wednesday.

Among the objects are a damaged statue and three stone tomb reliefs from Palmyra, as well as a Bronze pin from Ugarit. The restoration work will be carried out in Terezín by Czech and Syrian experts and is expected to take about a year.