News

Police have arrested a fifty-two-year-old man who attacked six people with a knife at a petrol station in Prague on Wednesday afternoon. The police have ruled out a terrorist attack saying the detainee was a local and had committed the attack under the influence of alcohol. Three people were injured; one of them was transported to hospital with a stab wound to his neck. The two others were treated on the spot by paramedics. The motive is as yet unclear.

The US chip manufacturer Onsemi is planning to invest up to $2 billion in its production facility in Czechia, the Czech government said on Wednesday. It is the biggest single foreign investment in the country’s modern history.

The company’s chip production in Rožnov pod Radhoštem is expected to shoot up by hundreds of percent, boosting value-added production, creating thousands of new jobs and contributing more than CZK 6 billion annually to the country’s GDP.

The company said the move “would solidify advanced power semiconductor supply chain for its European and global customer base.”

The Czech  government will negotiate with Onsemi in the coming months about incentives.

The Senate has approved lawyer and sociologist Jiří Přibáň and Supreme Administrative Court judge Tomáš Langášek for judges of the Constitutional Court. Both were nominated by President Petr Pavel.

Přibáň graduated from the Faculty of Law at Charles University and is a professor of law at Cardiff University in Wales, where he also heads the Centre for Law and Society. Langášek has been a judge of the Supreme Administrative Court since March 2013.

Labour Minister Marian Jurečka and the KOVO trade union organization have called on the employees of the country’s largest steelworks Liberty Ostrava, which is in insolvency, not to resign. Most of the company’s operations have been closed since December and employees have not been getting paid.  The labour minister said that the fate of Liberty is a top government priority and the state would look for ways to pay employees' wages to keep them in the company so that it can continue to operate when a new owner takes over, presumably in the summer. How many workers will remain at Liberty will depend on the investor who acquires the company, the minister added.