News

Major renovation work has begun on the Thermal hotel in Karlovy Vary. The building will be closed from January until mid-March because of the renovations, which will cost CZK 580 million.

Work on some parts of Thermal was launched in November. The building, which dates from the 1970s and hosts the Karlovy Vary film festival every year, belongs to the Czech state.

Charles University students who for several days blocked the rectorate building have agreed to end their occupation strike. They also withdrew their demand that Rector Tomáš Zima resign immediately.

Following a three-hour meeting on Monday evening with the protesters, the Academic Senate agreed to adopt a resolution that Charles University would proactively address fighting climate change, ČTK reports.

Zima has been in the spotlight in recent weeks for his role in establishing a Czech-Chinese Centre at Charles University, where some events seem to have been funded by the Chinese Embassy. The Academic Senate has agreed to review Zima's mandate and seek climate neutrality by 2022.

The Czech government has approved a 7 percent digital tax on large internet businesses such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. According to Ministry of Finance estimates, the new tax would bring in 5 billion crowns of revenue a year.

The Ministry of Finance proposes introducing a so-called DST model of digital tax as proposed earlier by the European Commission.

Subject to the new tax would be internet companies with a global turnover of over EUR 750 million (CZK 19.1 billion) and annual turnover in the Czech Republic of over CZK 100 million.

Some digital economy platforms such as Airbnb and Uber that allow users to provide services and goods to each other for a transaction fee would also be subject to the tax.

Prague City Hall agreed on Monday to sign a memorandum pledging to remove fragments of Jewish tombstones used as cobblestones in the city centre and return them to the community.

Pedestrian zones on Prague’s high street Na Příkopě and at the base of Wenceslas Square were repaired under Communism in part using tombstones from a derelict 19th century Jewish cemetery in Chomutov.

The work was reportedly carried out ahead of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1987.

The Jewish community, which has for years called for the fragments to be removed, plans to deposit them in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Žižkov district. A project called "Finding the Lost Face of Jewish Cemeteries" will try to help identify the fragments.