The Daily Dozen: 12 things to know about Czechia today

The Czech government yesterday approved lowering office temperatures amid the ongoing energy crisis. The minimum temperature, set in 2007, depends on the category of workers. For instance, the current minimum temperature in offices and administrative or laboratory work, which is 22 degrees, will be lowered to 18 degrees. Drivers, workers at assembly lines, and cashiers will see a drop from the current 18 degrees to 16 degrees Celsius.

The Czech Republic will introduce police checks at 27 former border crossings with Slovakia due to illegal migration, mainly of Syrians. The crossings include 17 road, seven railway, and three river crossings. In other places, it will not be possible to cross the state border for at least the next 10 days starting at midnight on Wednesday night. Farmers, foresters, hunters, and fishermen will be exempt from controls when performing their work in the immediate border area, the Czech Police said in a press release.

There's an inverse correlation between the chances of success at the polls for potential presidential candidates and ad spending on Facebook, Investigace.cz reports. For instance, Karel Janeček and Tomáš Březina, who according to polls have the lowest chances of being elected to office, spent CZK 849,940 and CZK 469,199 respectively for ads on Facebook. The list of candidates will officially close on Nov. 8.

Former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who is yet to confirm that he is running for office, spent CZK 170,991 during the same time period. The information is based on Investigace.cz's analysis of data from the company Meta, which owns Facebook, collected in their Ad Library.

Prague's population grew by almost 5,000 people in the first half of this year, according to data from the Financial and Economic Institute. The growth was mainly driven by people who moved to the Czech capital from elsewhere, which represented 22,600 in the first six months of this year. During the same time, 18,052 people moved away from Prague, whose population in 2019 was 1.309 million people. The statistics don't take into account refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine who moved to Prague.

The celebrations for the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah are in full swing in Prague. The Chabad Prague community organization observed the holiday through a number of traditional activities, such as blowing the shofar (ram’s horn) yesterday and today before noon.

The holiday, which marks the day God created Adam and Eve, as well as the start of the Jewish year, began at sundown on Sept. 25 and ends today after nightfall. Traditional foods associated with the holiday are sweet and include round challah bread, which is studded with raisins, and apples dipped in honey.

A wire sculpture of a sad dog is leaving Prague for a festival in Dresden, Pražská Drbna reports. Artist František Skála's Sad Dog, which has been sitting on the Vltava embankment at Rašínovo nábřeží, will take part in All Power to the Imagination: Czech Season in Dresden Skála said the seven-meter sculpture, which has been christened Dratoslav von Mischling, Slávek, or Vulpes Gott, is a monument to endangered species, and to outcasts.

Organizers confirmed that Roger Waters' concert in Prague will take place as planned, despite the cancellation of the former Pink Floyd member's gigs in Poland, according to ČTK. Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1985, wrote an open letter earlier this month to the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accusing "extreme nationalists" of being responsible for the current conflict in Ukraine.

His stance drew criticism in Poland, and Live Nation Polska announced on Saturday that concerts scheduled to take place next April at the Krakow's Tauron Arena have been cancelled. 

The next edition of the World Bouldering Cup will take place between June 2 and 4, 2023, at Letná park in the heart of Prague, Česká televize reports. The results of the Czech Mountaineering Association in bouldering competitions played a role in the decision. This summer, Czech athlete Adam Ondra claimed bronze at the men's joint boulder and lead event, bronze in the boulder and gold in lead climbing at the 2022 European sport climbing championships in Munich.

Domestic travel agencies and airlines based at Prague’s Václav Havel Airport will expand their offer with several exotic tourist destinations this winter, news server iDnes reported. In cooperation with 50 carriers, the airport will offer flights to more than 90 destinations. New or returning destinations include Madagascar, Krabi in Thailand, Hurghada, and Marsa Alam, as well as Oslo and London City Airport. The winter flight schedule, however, will only be at 75 to 80 percent of what it was before Covid. 

The first self-service convenience store (samoobsluha) in Czechoslovakia, a drugstore, opened on Sept. 27, 1955, on the street Česká 8 in Brno, according to Wikipedia. Self-service food stores, where people could pick out items themselves, also opened in Brno and Prague that same year, a trend that became widespread later in the decade.

Starting on Sept. 28, the life and work of former Czech and Czechoslovak president Václav Havel will be in the spotlight at a three-day conference at the Colby College in Maine. Called "Havel and Our Crisis," the event was supposed to take place last year but was canceled due to Covid. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the topics promoted by Havel are all the more up-to-date, organizer Milan Babik said. Vaclav Havel Library head Michael Žantovský, French political scientist and historian Jacques Rupnik, and Czech literary historian Martin C. Putna, among others, will attend the conference.

The season of respiratory infections in children started earlier than usual, Seznam Zprávy reports, citing medical professionals. The first weeks of school and kindergarten saw children coming in with high temperatures. Some of them were also positive for Covid. The trend is also likely due to the September temperatures so far, which are lower than usual for this time of the year. Additionally, doctors noticed an exponential increase in the number of people infected with chicken pox, which reached 48,000 people by the beginning of August, compared to fewer than 6,000 last year.