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The Czech minister of defence, Jana Černochová, says that greater financial rewards will be offered to potential soldiers in regions of the country where the Czech Army is having trouble attracting new recruits. She made the comment after talks on Tuesday with the chief of the General Staff, Karel Řehka.

Ms. Černochová said, for instance, that the army’s 4th Rapid Deployment Brigade based near Žatec, Northwestern Bohemia, had been around 50 percent understaffed for some time.

She said hitherto recruitment drives had failed to attract enough new soldiers.

The army aims to increase troop numbers by a few thousand by the end of the decade, while at the same time more than doubling its active reserves.

Jan Schmid, who was founder, director and long-time artistic chief of the Studio Ypsilon theatre, has died at the age of 87, a spokesperson for the Prague-based company said on Tuesday. Mr. Schmid was also an actor, arts journalist and teacher.

Studio Ypsilon was originally established in Liberec in 1963 but moved to Prague a decade and a half later.

Czech power giant ČEZ has narrowed down its shortlist of bidders to supply the country’s first small modular reactor. While seven would-be suppliers were under consideration, that number has been cut to four, the company said on Tuesday.

The semi-state ČEZ aims to have Czechia’s first small modular reactor at the Temelín power station in South Bohemia by the middle of the 2030s. The government wishes to build between six and 10 such facilities by 2050.

Small modular reactors are a type of small and advanced nuclear fission reactor.

Several hundred people, including students, university employees and school union members, attended a protest in the centre of Prague on Monday afternoon calling for an increase in higher education funding. Their demands included an increase of CZK 11 billion in funding for the humanities and a plan to stabilise funding for 2025 to 2030.

The protest began at 4pm with speeches on Jan Palach Square in front of Charles University's Faculty of Arts building. The protestors then marched to the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance and the seat of the Czech government, the Straka Academy.

The demonstration, named "System Collapse", was organised by the Hour of Truth, a movement which has organised several protests over the last year against the chronic underfunding of the humanities in Czechia.