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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.

The heavy rain and thunderstorms that hit parts of Czechia over the weekend and on Monday should mostly have subsided by Tuesday. There is still a possibility of some light showers on Tuesday morning and afternoon but they should clear up by the evening. Skies will however remain mostly cloudy and overcast. Daytime temperatures should range between 14 and 21 degrees Celsius.

Four out of ten Czechs think that the oft-cited "information war" with Russia is just an excuse for Western governments to restrict freedom of speech, according to a survey carried out in the Visegrad Group (V4) countries by the Central European Digital Media Observatory (CEDMO). The survey found that 41 percent of respondents agreed with this statement in both Czechia and Hungary, compared to 35 percent in Slovakia and 24 percent in Poland.

On the other hand, 39 percent of Czechs said they thought that Russia was indeed waging an information war against the West, including in their own country. This was more than in Hungary, where only about a third of respondents agreed with this statement, but less than in Slovakia (42 percent) and Poland (55 percent).

The survey also asked how easy or difficult it was for people to determine the veracity of news on specific topics ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections. The most difficult topic for Czechs to verify information about was the European Commission's policy on the future of the automobile industry, such as the ban on internal combustion engines, with almost half of Czech respondents, 49 percent, saying they found it difficult to distinguish between true and false information on this topic. This was followed by the war in Ukraine (48 percent) and the energy crisis (47 percent).