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First images of the Pražská Lítačka – the working title of a new planned card to be used as a chargeable pass by public transit users in Prague have been released, featuring simple lettering against a green backdrop. The card is to replace the city’s Opencard, the unhappy administration of which had fallen to City Hall over legal issues with the system's former administrator eMoneyServices.

Elderly Czech women living alone are at an increased risk of poverty, according to a survey released by the Czech Statistics Office. Fifteen percent of Czechs aged over 65 and living alone are threatened with poverty and women’s risk of poverty is almost double, compared with men, the study says.

Though the Czech state is not planning to bury spent nuclear fuel for another half-century, it is already looking ahead with the creation of an underground lab at Europe’s last uranium mine to test conditions for a repository, the news website iDnes.cz reported on Wednesday.

Real estate magnate and former banker Václav Skala has bought Kotva, an icon among Prague department stores which first opened some 36 years ago when then-Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. The price of the deal? Around two billion crowns (the equivalent 80 million euros).

For the last half year the Czech Republic’s dominant electricity company and nuclear power plant operator ČEZ has been plagued by flawed safety checks at both of its nuclear power plants. It now turns out that the flawed checks continued for around a decade.

The Prague Public Transport Authority has begun ‘field testing’ a new tram, the low-floor EVO1. As of Monday this week, commuters on the No. 6 line were able to travel on the new transit vehicle and at the weekend the tram will be running again on the capital’s lines No. 5 and No. 7.

Retail sales in the Czech Republic climbed by 5.9 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year, the Czech Statistical Office has announced. That was the strongest sales performance since 2008, just before the country slumped into a long-lasting recession.

The number of young working Czechs has been decreasing since the early 1990s. The employment rate of people between the ages of 15 to 24 in the Czech Republic is the lowest in the EU, the Czech Statistical Office announced on Wednesday.

Czech hard coal miner New World Resources’ OKD unit wants to lay off half of its employees within the next two years. Although the move is not unexpected and the Czech government has been debating ways of softening its social impact, the lay-offs will present a serious problem in a region with a 19.2 percent unemployment rate.

After a long time on the back burner, the question of euro adoption seems to be making a comeback in the Czech Republic. Champions of the idea are now pointing out that the country fulfills nearly all the criteria for joining the euro-zone and the timing could hardly be better.