Czech morning news in brief: top stories for Jan. 7, 2021

People who wish to travel from the Czech Republic to Switzerland will face a ten-day quarantine from Jan. 15, regardless of the coronavirus test, the State Department stated on Twitter. According to the office, Switzerland is currently the only Alpine country that allows Czechs to travel to winter resorts without further conditions.

The Czech Republic was on the Swiss quarantine list in the autumn as well, but at that time, the mandatory 10-day quarantine did not apply to transit through Switzerland within 24 hours, nor to transfers to connecting flights at airport terminals.

The Czech Republic will open a new honorary consulate in Peterborough in England in connection with Britain's departure from the EU, and its head will be Petr Torak who worked for the British police in the past and received the Order of the British Empire.

Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek told Czech Television that he believes Torak is the man who can talk to Czechs staying in Britain and help them so that they do not get into problems in the following months. Read more here.

The Czech state paid out almost 564 million crowns in subsidies to 45 political parties in 2020, about 60 million less than in the preceding year when some parties received an extra subsidy to cover their spending on the EU elections, the data on the Finance Ministry's web show.

The largest sum went to the senior government ANO movement, 145.8 million crowns. It received half of the sum for its parliament seats and 47 million for its seats in regional assemblies. The second most successful party in this respect are the opposition Civic Democrats (ODS) with 77.3 million crowns worth of state subsidies last year. See the full story here.

For the first number of electric cars sold in the Czech Republic reached more than a thousand according to recent statistics prepared by the Association of Car Importers.

While in 2019 our authorities assigned registration marks to only 756 new electric cars, 2020 saw a four-fold increase with exactly 3262 new cars. Sales of plug-in hybrid cars also increased at a similar pace. Read the full story here.

Czech restorers from the University of Pardubice (UPA) will help renovate monuments in the city of Oran, Algeria, where they will restore sculptures in a theatre and take care of a part of the Algerian National Museum collection.

The partnership of the Algerian and Czech ministries of Culture is meant to reinforce mutual exchange concerning the restoration of monuments. UPA experts and students were involved in saving significant sights abroad in the past already. They worked in the Petra archaeological city in Jordan and two sites in Iraq. The full press release is available here.