Last week 16/08

Warmer days replaced morning frosts. Charlton Heston died. In reaction to reports of an unexpected drop in US reserves, the price of oil rose to $112.25 per barrel. The government approved a massive healthcare reform package. On the occasion of International Roma Day, members of the local Roma community lit candles on Prague's Náměstí Míru below an improvised memorial to victims murdered here in recent years by racist extremists. „Yes, the case is closed. The deed happened, we don't know the perpetrator,“ Robert Šlachta, the new head of the police's organized-crime unit (ÚOOZ), told Hospodářské noviny, confirming that the police had shelved the murder case of mobster František Mrázek, who, in light of his contacts to top politicians, became a symbol of the melding of organized crime and state administration. A sweeping probe by the Czech School Inspection (Česká školní inspekce) revealed that one-sixth of Czech schools are incapable of teaching their students to read a text, comprehend it and then use it in practice. Passers-by found a healthy newborn child on the steps of an apartment block in Vsetín. Newspapers reported that Hu Jia, a critic of China's Communist regime, had been sentenced in Beijing to six years in prison for „inciting subversion of state power.“ „In the name of God, our children and their children, in the name of the beautiful Tibetan people, don't go to the Olympics,“ said the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader and head of its exiled government, appealing to world politicians to boycott the upcoming summer Olympic Games in China. Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg declared in Paris that he personally would not go to the Olympics and called on the European Union to invite the Dalai Lama to the highest level of talks. Singer and erstwhile skinhead guru Daniel Landa announced on television that he would hold a nationwide poll asking whether Czechs are afraid of him – and that, if the answer is „yes,“ he would reportedly move to Bavaria. Bees disappeared and veterinarians pronounced that they are being killed off by a debilitating varroa epidemic. The Green Party's national council delegated its representatives in the government and parliamentarians to vote against building the US radar base in Brdy, which the party's dissenting chairman, Martin Bursík, dismissed as „wishful thinking.“ „The radar, military apparatus of the most aggressive country in the world, should divide Europe, cow Russia, from purely self-seeking reasons of the most powerful people on the planet, which Bush isn't even one of,“ Vít Horčička, a member of the Green Party's foreign section, wrote in a letter to Respekt explaining the party's position. The Brno headquarters of APLA, a support organization for people with autism, opened an exhibition called, „Who autists are, how they live and who helps them.“

„The problem is that we have either clothing for periods of rest, when we aren't moving, or for walking fast, but don't have clothes for walking slowly. Since he can't keep up with us, and without us he would die, we have to make stops and hope that a helicopter arrives soon to pick him up,“ director Petr Horký told Czech newspapers, describing how his trip to the North Pole had developed since a totally exhausted Ecuadorian tourist joined him and his companion during unexpected bad weather. One hundred years passed since the birth of František Kriegl, the physician and politician who, despite death threats, was the only member of the Czechoslovak delegation abducted in 1968 to refuse to sign the Moscow Protocol in which the Soviet Army's occupation of Czechoslovakia was termed „requested international assistance.“ Repairs began on the Baroque church in Žďár nad Sázavou. „Money surely doesn't exist for the sake of spending, it exists for facilitating freedom; when we don't spend our client's money, we're helping him a lot,“ said renowned architect Martin Rajniš in an interview for Respekt, pinpointing one of the problems with modern attention-grabbing architecture, which, instead of making beautiful and natural things for a few thousand crowns, would rather squander one-hundred times more on ostentatious „design trends.“ The Jehovah's Witnesses lost their battle to be granted a special right to confessional confidentiality. It emerged that the most famous Austrian archeological find, the Venus of Willendorf, apparently comes from Moravia.

Two prospective Czech buyers approached Virgin Galactic, which is offering tickets for space flights from 2009 for 3.5 million crowns.