Last week 13/2006

Astronomical spring arrived. New snow fell on the snowdrifts in higher altitudes. Storks flew in. Former president Václav Havel’s wife Dagmar Havlová returned to the stage of Vinohrady Theatre. Night skies were adorned with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thousands of Prague residents from the Lhotka, Libuš, and Kamýk housing estates gathered for the opening of the gates of the new suburban supermarket complex Novo Plaza. Jan Hanáček, secretary to the labor minister and chairman of the Hodonín district chapter of the Social Democrat Party (ČSSD), was arrested on suspicion of corruption.

Tiscali was the first company to offer Czech customers high-speed internet for under 400 Czech crowns per month. There were ninety new cases of people infected with HIV. Slobodan Milosevic was buried in Pozarevac, Serbia. “I don’t know why we did it; the guys started and so I joined in,” replied a twenty-year-old in an Opava courtroom when asked why he and two friends beat a homeless man to death last summer at the Opava train station. The Travel Industry Olympics took place in Prague. The partially state-owned electric power monopoly ČEZ announced an annual profit of 22 billion crowns, and its management warned the public that the conglomerate will raise electricity rates. Jaroslava Moserová died. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sharply protested against the Belarus secret police, whose members in Minsk beat reporter Jan Rybář and confiscated his laptop with news about the demonstrations against the re-election of Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as president. The government allocated one and a half billion crowns to reduce the debt of state-operated hospitals. Ski-jumper Jakub Janda won the World Cup. “He should have done that a long time ago,” Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek, remarking on Foreign Minister Cyril Svboda’s proposal for Czech authorities to start harassing American, Australian, and Canadian tourists in retaliation for their governments requiring visas for Czech visitors when the Czech Republic doesn’t. Eurostat, a Brussels-based statistics authority, learned that Czechs spend more time at work than any other EU citizens. Czech scientists received in Vienna the prestigious European IST award for the best IT invention for their 14 Control product, which enables users to control their PC by eye movements. In a repeat vote, the Chamber of Deputies rejected the Criminal Code, which had been approved in the past and has been drafted for ten years. The 13th annual Febiofest film festival began in Prague. In a Center for University Studies survey, forty percent of Czech college students said that “under no circumstances” do they want to go on a study visit abroad because they don’t know any foreign languages well. “It’s an achievement – just two years ago, that percentage was 62 %,” said the pollsters from the Center of the survey result. Miroslava Moučková, editor-in-chief of the communist newspaper Haló noviny, was voted in as a new member of the Council of Czech News Agency (CTK), the watchdog for “objectivity and balance” in CTK’s reporting, thanks to votes from Communist and Social Democratic representatives. Meteorological statistics ranked this winter as the longest and harshest in the last 36 years. Psychologists called on the public to visit solariums for healing rays due to the lack of real sunlight. The state finished preparing their case against “forest murderer” Viktor Kalivoda, who went around the Czech Republic last year shooting people he randomly met on trails. In light of perpetual losses, the supermarket chain Delvita decided to send foreign managers to the Czech Republic. “Dogs, you can sniff the places I pissed on before – but don’t be surprised if I manage to piss on the whole block in the meantime. It’s your time that’s being wasted,”Lidove noviny magazín quoted rapper Hugo Toxxx’s message to his enemies on the cover of the album Česká kuře: Neurofolk. A court restituted Kokořín Castle to its original owners. After three years of waiting, cosmologists received data from the WMAP probe, which measures from a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth the intensity of residual cosmic radiation from the time the universe was not even one second old. The government established a Council for Aging. The moon eclipsed the sun and summer time began.