News

The Regional Court in Ostrava has opened insolvency proceedings with the Liberty Ostrava Steelworks, the largest steel producer in Czechia. The insolvency petition was filed by the company itself which said it was unable to meet overdue liabilities exceeding CZK 5 billion. Liberty has been struggling with severe financial problems since last autumn. Most of its operations have been closed since December of last year. The company employs 5,000 people.

The Czech Army is offering 130 secondary students aged over 18 the chance to undergo a basic military training course. The Chief of the General Staff Karel Řehka said the aim was to attract future recruits and at the same time increase the resilience of the society by expanding the army’s reserves. The four-week summer course will be held at the Rapid Deployment Brigade in Žatec and the Mechanized Brigade in Hranice and students who complete it will be paid 30,000 crowns.

The Czech government has announced that after close to half a century, Czechia will have another astronaut in space. The man preparing for the mission is Czech fighter pilot Aleš Svoboda from the Czech Army’s Tactical Air Force Base in Čáslav. In 2022 he succeeded in the European Space Agency's selection procedure and became a member of the reserve astronaut team. The government received an offer to send him on a space mission last year, but considered the project too costly. Now it has agreed to provide the finances. Svoboda will be the second Czech astronaut in space after Vladimir Remek who went up on a Russian Sojuz flight in 1978.

The Ministry of Health is changing its guidelines to hospitals for blood donation so as not to automatically exclude men who have sex with men from donating blood. The gender or sexual orientation of the person will no longer play a role in their eligibility for being a blood donor.

Up until now, although all donors' blood was tested for HIV, men were automatically excluded from donating blood if they had had sex with another man in the last six months. The ministry had previously justified the measure by saying that sex between men was considered to carry a greater risk of HIV infection.

The new recommendation is that people who have had protected or unprotected anal intercourse with a new sexual partner in the last four months, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, won't be allowed to donate. According to a healthy ministry spokesperson, this is based on internationally accepted recommendations issued by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).