News

Daria Kashcheeva’s 15-minute long animated puppet movie Dcera (Daughter) has been nominated for an Oscar in the best animated short category. The 33-year-old Kashcheeva, is a Russian student currently studying at FAMU film school in Prague.

In an interview with Radio Prague International after she won the student Oscar in the same category in September, she said the Dcera is about the relationship between a father and his daughter, but could also be interpreted as about “relationships between people who are close in general. How one small misunderstanding can influence such relationships for a long time and why it is important to be able to forgive those who are close to us.”

On February 10, when the awards are announced, she will be up against Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver, Kitbull by Rosana Sullivan and Kathryn Hendrickson, Memorable by Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre and the stop-motion short Sister directed by Chinese born Siqi Song.

The Ministry for Regional Development will amend its proposal for a new Building Act, Minister Klára Dostálova told Czech Television on Monday after a meeting with the head of the Association of Towns and Districts. The decision comes after heavy criticism from the association, which primarily represents regional officials, as well as remarks from courts which studied the proposed legislation.

The ministry says it now intends to cut down on the level of centralisation it originally envisaged. Local building authorities at the district level will be preserved, while public works and large construction programmes will be decided on the state level.

Close to one in five companies was exposed to a cyberattack in 2018, a year on year increase of around 20 percent, according to new data released by the Czech Statistics Agency. The most common form of attack was denial-of-service, wherein the perpetrator floods the targeted resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

The most endangered entities are the state administration, banks, energy companies and, increasingly, universities. Experts say that the threats that companies face are not only external but sometimes from the businesses’ own employees too.

Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the Social Democrats Jan Hamáček says he is ready to recommend fellow party member Kateřina Valachová for the position of ombudswoman to President Miloš Zeman, although he says that the nomination is ultimately up to the president, the Czech News Agency reported on Monday. The President Zeman first suggested Mrs Valachová for the position on Sunday, but he said he would only nominate her if Mr. Hamáček agreed.

The news comes after the president’s previous candidate, Helena Válková of the ANO party, announced she will no longer be running for the position after it emerged that she had co-authored an article on “protective surveillance” during the Communist era with an infamous show trial prosecutor from the 1950s.