News

Around 20 people in the South Bohemian Region have been ordered to stay in quarantine at home for a two-week period in connection with fears over the Covid-19 virus, Czech Television reported on Tuesday. Similar restrictions were placed on one person in South Moravia. All of those placed in quarantine have returned from a region of Italy where cases of the coronavirus have been recorded.

Eleven Czechs who came back from Iran, where people have also died of Covid-19, were taken to Prague’s Na Bulovce hospital on Tuesday morning.

The State Security Council is meeting to discuss the situation surrounding the disease on Tuesday evening.

The head of the Czech Army says that years of neglect and cost-cutting have reduced it to a skeleton that needs to be built up again, Novinky.cz reported. Speaking at an army command assembly on Tuesday, the chief of the General Staff, Aleš Opata, called for acceleration in the modernisation of the force’s heavy equipment.

General Opata said using Russian technology was not the way to go for the Czech Army, which was being left behind by its allies. Potential adversaries are a generation ahead of the Czechs, he added.

The chief of the General Staff said soldiers were expecting political leaders to make good on their promise to reach NATO military spending targets by 2024. Government leaders recently raised doubts over whether this would be achieved.

The Czech police have recommended that two more people face trial for expressing approval on the internet of last year’s terrorist attack in New Zealand. The police have now called for a total of five people to be tried for the support of terrorism in this connection, a representative of the Supreme State Attorney’s Office in Prague said on Tuesday. The charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years.

According to previous information, 12 people in the Czech Republic are being investigated on suspicion of publicly approving of a terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch that left 51 people dead.

The percentage of Czechs who are “satisfied with their lives” has grown in recent years, suggests an opinion poll released by the STEM agency. Some 85 percent of respondents in the survey conducted in January answered in the affirmative, with the remainder saying they were dissatisfied.

STEM says it has traced a gradual increase in satisfaction levels since 2015. Last month’s rate was the highest recorded since the regular poll was introduced in 1994, it said.