News

The body of Czech climber Milan Sedláček, who died in the Himalayas in 2012, was removed from the mountains during a recent clean-up operation regularly organized by the Nepalese authorities.

The BBC News website reported on Saturday that the Nepalese army had found Sedláček's identity documents on one of the bodies. Three other bodies and one skeleton were also retrieved during the operation.

Sedláček, then 50, was part of an expedition led by Leopold Sulovský, the first Czech climber to summit Mount Everest, died while descending from the summit of Lhotse, the world’s fourth highest mountain.

A replica of a Roman rowboat, built by experts from the German University of Erlangen-Nuremberg based on archaeological findings, docked on Saturday at the Nové Mlýny Reservoir in Pasohlávky, south Moravia.

The 18-metre-long and five-tonne boat is part of the summer programme Gateway to the Roman Empire, organised by the Czech Academy of Science’s Institute of Archaeology in Brno.

The boat, which can accommodate 20 people, was made using the same methods once used by Roman craftsmen. It will be on display at the Visitor Centre Mušov until September 5.

Several more Czech businesses and services were hit by the global IT services outage on Friday. Most BENU pharmacies in the country were closed, and the online prescription service eRecept was also not working. Insurance company Allianz, one of the biggest in the country, announced that its call centre, online services and assistance service were all unavailable due to the outage.

The music festival Colours of Ostrava, currently taking place in the east Moravian capital, was also hit. The festival organisers announced that Iranian-Dutch singer Sevdaliza would not be performing on the main stage at her scheduled time of 8pm on Friday as her flight had been cancelled due to the outage. The festival said it was trying to make arrangements for the singer to get to Czechia so she could perform on Saturday instead.

Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan had written earlier in the day on social media site X that banking and healthcare systems in Czechia had not been affected.

Several hectares of crops were destroyed by a fire in a grain field in South Moravia around noon on Friday. Several firefighting units were called to the scene as a second degree Fire Alert Level was declared. The firefighters managed to extinguish the fire, but the cause of the blaze is so far still unknown.

The fire occurred in a field in Terezín in South Morava, not to be confused with Terezín in the Ústí nad Labem Region, which was the site of a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp during World War II.