Last week 17/08

The crown jewels were exhibited at Prague Castle. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek officially declared that he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing to protest the actions of the Chinese in occupied Tibet. The price of oil jumped from $112 to $114 per barrel. Flying Rhino, NATO’s annual international air training exercise, began in Náměšt nad Oslavou. With the approaching warm spring, retailers announced a record rise in interest in garden tractors and lawn mulching mowers. Two Mongolians in a car fell into a river near Havlíčkův Brod. „So what? There are lots like that. The president is not obliged to appoint anyone. Your question is suggestive and silly,“ replied the president’s spokesperson, Petr Hájek, when asked by Hospodářské noviny why Václav Klaus has yet to appoint judicial candidate Petr Langer, who graduated with a first-class honors degree in law, has completed several foreign educational stays and is eager to become a judge in Ostrava, which has a shortage of judges; Klaus has thereby been getting back at Langer after this promising young lawyer filed suit against the president for not appointing him as a judge in 2005 on grounds that he hadn’t reached the age of 30 (while the law sets the minimum age at 25). Australian financiers’ speculative purchases of the Czech crown pushed the currency to a record high against the euro - 23:1. „He should buy whatever he wants if he can afford it, but a pair of oxen couldn’t drag me there; it’s the worst piece of land in the world: nothing but crocodiles, stench and retirees,“ remarked former Culture Minister Vítězslav Jandák (Social Democratic Party – ČSSD) on the fact that party colleague Stanislav Gross, the former prime minster suspected of corruption, had purchased an apartment in Florida for 11 million crowns. „They aren’t our voters, retirees vote for the Civic Democratic Party,“ Jandák then told reporters from Mladá fronta Dnes when asked whether he minds that his comparison of retirees with stench offended some of ČSSD’s supporters. The media reported that the train link between India and Bangladesh had been reinstated after a 40-year absence. Archaeologists discovered a prehistoric cult monument – a rondel surrounded by a settlement estimated to be 6,000 years old – beneath the future Kolín bypass. The Czech national tennis team lost to the Russians in the Davis Cup quarterfinals. The computers and networks of Czech pro-Tibetan liberation organizations were attacked by unknown hackers, who attempted to steal data via a Trojan horse virus; Malé Občanské Sdružení Tolerance (Charitable Society of Tolerance) spokesperson Matěj Kastner notified the media that, in light of the type of attack, it was most likely orchestrated by the same government or pro-government Beijing hackers who are behind the wave of attacks against Western pro-Tibet organizations unleashed from China following the recent civil unrest in Lhasa that began on Tibetan Uprising Day.

„We don’t have any fuel for our cooker, we don’t have any food, we don’t have anything left,“ complained Czech tourist Miluše Netolická during a phone call home; Netolická and two friends set off on a journey to the North Pole where, because of bad weather, they had to wait at the pole a day longer for a rescue helicopter to arrive from the Russian polar station Barneo. A truck carrying hydrogen crashed in Ostrava. The Czech pharmaceutical company Zentiva decided to produce a generic version of Viagra. Mladá fronta Dnes informed its readers that raising a child in the Czech Republic costs 2.5 million crowns. Trout returned to the Jizera mountains. Fifty Czech artists wrote a letter calling on the Czech Culture Ministry to remove the National Gallery’s director, Milan Knižák, who was appointed to the post during the opposition agreement as part of a political deal and who - according to the protest letter – has dragged the National Gallery into “isolation, self-centeredness and an inability to keep in step with European developments”; the artists also called on the minister to hold a regular open international competition to fill the post. In Ostrava, two trams collided, killing three people and injuring 40 more. In just one week, the price of rice doubled. The rising price of food increased the European rate of inflation to a record 3.8 percent. News agencies carried reports that sharply rising food prices are already shaking the political stability of dozens of countries and that an age-old enemy – hunger – is raising its ugly head again. Meat consumption rose in the Czech Republic. Ivana Trumpová got married for the third time.