Last week 18/08

After months of going up, food prices stood still. The price of oil hit $120 per barrel and analysts announced that it would not stop there. The waiting period for viewing the crown jewels at the Prague Castle reached seven hours. The processing industry's five-year tax holiday came to an end. The boating season at the Brno reservoir opened with the Pionýr, Brno, Bratislava, Praha, Dallas and Veveří ships setting sail. „The acts in question happened a long time ago and the defendant gave the Czech Republic's musical activities a good name abroad,“ said Hradec Králové judge Miloslav Ježek, explaining why he only sentenced Bohumil Kulínský, former director of the Bambini di Praga children's choir, to three years' probation instead of a prison term for sexually abusing 40 underage girls from his choir. The media reported that Russia had begun shooting down Georgian planes over Georgia. The Czech Cabinet decided to bolster the Czech mission in Afghanistan by sending 100 more soldiers from the special forces unit from Prostějov. The first round of secondary school entrance exams was held. Civic Democratic Party (ODS) senators upheld the immunity of Senator Liana Janáčková, who is being investigated by police to determine whether she committed a crime by her public declaration two years ago that „Gypsies had over- oliferated“ in the Czech Republic and that the only way she - as the mayor of Ostrava's Mariánské Hory quarter - could only stop it would be to drive them beyond a barbed wire fence and detonate dynamite." „But I do write about them with detachment - for me they are historical subjects to whom I have no emotional relationship whatsoever as individuals; when I call a cop a pig, it's a rhetorical device,“ replied writer Petr Plácek when asked by Mladá fronta Dnes, „In your book Fízl (Cop), you call secret police whores, motherfuckers, monsters; could you write about them with detachment?“ Rare photos of M83, or the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, showed that new stars are being formed in the outer limits of the galaxy, i.e., in places that were previously considered to have too little matter to form bodies massive enough to spark thermonuclear reactions. Microsoft announced it would block illegal copies of Windows. Former dissidents met in the Senate building in Prague to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted. The government decided to build a dam at Nové Heřmanovy and drive 24 families from their homes. „The reader can be led into the story like this, too: during my internship at Respekt, there was a long list of mobile numbers hanging over the editorial conference table, including contacts for Weigl and Šlouf, and next to Radovan Krejčíř's South African mobile number was a star with a note: don't circulate,“ wrote Matěj Stropnický, deputy chairman of the Green Party's national council, in his critique of Respekt published in Literární noviny; Stropnický's two-month internship at Respekt occurred in 2004, roughly a year before businessman Krejčíř fled the Czech Republic and obtained a South African mobile number. Meteorologists warned that warm weather would come in May. Jan Zrzavý's Piazzetta was sold for 7.1 million crowns at an auction at the Hilton hotel, breaking the former record of 6.7 million for Emil Filla's Still Life on a Table. Jan Munk, director of the Terezín national memorial, rejected an offer from the neo-fascist Národní strana (National Party) for its members to guard the former ghetto where the Nazis once assembled Jews for deportation to gas chambers and where today unknown assailants stole 824 bronze plates with the names of the victims from the cemetery and sold them into private collections. Cloth diapers made a comeback on the market. Parliament approved a law ordering telephone operators to save for one year for the police not only records of whom their clients call and exchange text messages with, but also the numbers of missed calls to their mobile phones. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek introduced a plan to move all government institutions into one big building on the outskirts of Prague. „There was a boom, the light went out and he started to burn,“ said an inhabitant of a cottage in the Jizerka mountain settlement, describing how ball lightning zoomed inside and killed a man sitting under a lamp at a table with four friends. Wild boars began moving into Ústí nad Labem from surrounding woods in search of food. A CVVM survey showed that 20 percent of Czech residents (two percentage points down from last year) would welcome an authoritative regime governing the country instead of a democratic system. Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Čech became Adidas's global face. The price of bricks dropped.