News

The 46th annual Summer Film School and Festival in Uherské Hradiště gets underway on Friday. Over the coming week, it will screen dozens of films – including a retrospective of the Polish director Andrzej Wajda.

The guests will include Czech director Vladimír Körner and Polish actress Hanna Schygulla.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the festival was postponed to a later date and cut short to six days and its complete programme will be available only for the holders of passes.

Czech President Miloš Zeman has sent a letter of condolences to the mayor of Hiroshima Kazumi Matsui on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on the Japanese city, which killed around 140 000 people.

In the letter, published by the Office of the President on Thursday, Mr Zeman expressed his grief over the death of dozens of thousands of people and the hope that the production of nuclear weapons will cease in the future.

The citizens of Hiroshima marked the event at 8.16 a.m. on Thursday, the exact moment the atomic bomb was dropped on the city in August 1945.

The reported number of cases of tick-borne encephalitis in the Czech Republic has increased by 25 percent on the previous year, according to data released by the National Institute of Public Health on Thursday.

366 cases of the potentially fatal disease were reported by the end of July, up from 297 in the previous summer.

The Czech Republic, along with the Baltic States, has the highest number of tick-borne encephalitis cases in Europe. There is no cure for the disease, but an increasing number of Czechs (roughly 29 percent last year) get themselves vaccinated against the disease.

According to the National Institute of Public Health, the number of Czechs who contracted the tick-born Lyme disease also increased during the period between January and July.

The Czech foreign trade surplus rose in June by CZK 17.6 billion in annual terms, to CZK 34.1 billion, which is the highest monthly figure in the country’s history, according to preliminary data published on Thursday by the Czech Statistics Office.

Exports dropped year-on-year by 0.4 percent to CZK 301.5 billion and imports by 6.6 percent to CZK 267.4 billion.

The balance was positively influenced mainly by the motor vehicle sector, where exports increased by 11.5 billion crowns, and a smaller deficit in refined petroleum products, chemicals, and oil and natural gas.