News

The Czech ice hockey team has secured a spot in the quarter-finals of the 2022 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship, after beating the US 1:0 in Tampere. Matej Blumel scored the game’s lone goal and goaltender Karel Vejmelka stopped all 24 shots fired his way.

Hospitals around the country say the Covid pandemic has created long waiting lists for hip replacement surgery and other surgical procedures that had to be postponed during the pandemic. Some hospitals say they have around 130 patients waiting for surgery and the waiting time has doubled since pre-pandemic times. Before Covid patients in line for hip replacement surgery waited for 12 months on average, now it is two years.  Medical institutions are also trying to catch up on cancer screenings and other procedures which were repeatedly postponed during the pandemic.

Czech sculptor Jiří Václav Hampl, co-author of the memorial to the children of Lidice has died at the age of 92. Hampl is best known for his work on the Lidice memorial which he created with his wife, sculptor Marie Uchytilová. They started working on the memorial, which consists of 82 statues of children in 1975, despite the fact that the communist authorities were against it and gave them no support whatsoever. Exhausted by the effort Marie died of a heart attack in 1989, one day before the start of the Velvet Revolution that toppled the communist regime. Jiří Hampl carried on, determined to finish their work. He spent years fundraising, and in the end, finished the memorial in 2,000. He donated it free of charge to the village of Lidice.

The website of the Czech Road and Rail Directorate is gradually being restored following a massive cyber attack last Tuesday. However, the site with traffic information for the public is still out of operation and the institution has asked the public for patience. According to the National Institute for Cyber Security the attack was the work of professional hackers.