Last week 18/2006

Following some sultry weather the rains came. A memorial service for Pavel Koutecký was held in the Strašnice crematorium. Environmentalists celebrated Earth Day by collecting garbage by trails, lakes, and waterways. The Czech National Bank stopped accepting revenue stamps. Fifty percent of children were – like every year – rejected access to education at grammar schools. President Václav Klaus met with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the USA and informed him that the European Union was suppressing freedom and democracy in its member states. In one of the pavilions at the Bohnice psychiatric clinic patient Věra Musilová (30) choked to death on her own excrement in a cage. A police commando discovered a clandestine factory for chemical poison in Libčany near Hradec Králové and took its staff into custody.

The ski season ended. In connection with the arrest of its top manager, Chung Mong-koo, on suspicion of asset-stripping and massive corruption, Hyundai suspended all foreign investments including the planned giant assembly plant in the Beskyd mountains due to which the local authorities recently threatened farmers refusing to sell their fields and meadows with expropriation. „Yeah, you bet those who didn't want the zone are on top now and are rubbing it in, ‚you were eager for the money and instead of that all you're left with now is devastated land.‘ Fact is, they felled all the trees on those parcels they bought off, and now the land around the village is completely different,“ a resident of Nošovice, where Chung Mong-koo's European factory was supposed to be erected, told Právo. Jiří Dědeček replaced Jiří Stránský as president of the Czech PEN Club. Prague native Jana Buchlová won the Miss Roma 2006 title in Hodonín. Dissatisfied general practitioners, dentists, and other healthcare workers began preparations for a week of protest events to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with how David Rath is running the Health Ministry. Tomáš Baťa had his sight tested in Zlín’s Baťa Hospital. A trio of unknown men attacked and beat a representative of the „moderate wing“ of the Communist Party, its Deputy Chairman Jiří Dolejš. A drunk driver ran into a father and child on a crosswalk in Kutná Hora and killed the two-year-old girl on the spot; it later surfaced that the driver had been detained by police for drunk driving three times in the last two weeks. „History is falsified, only those who really were guilty were tried under Klement Gottwald,“ Marta Semelová, a prominent Communist Party official and Czech history teacher at a basic school in Prague, told Hospodářské noviny. A festival of B-movies was held in Prague under the slogan „You’ll never feel safe after dark again.“ Gerhard Schröder walked to the peak of Říp hill with Jiří Paroubek. The Czech Republic maintained first place on the list of Europe countries with the most theft in shops. Thanks to a reduction in taxes, sugar, coffee, chocolate, and tea became cheaper. A court ruled that Prostějov hospital has to pay 16 million crowns in compensation to the parents of a four-year-old boy who, through negligence, did not receive enough oxygen during an operation; the boy, is still alive, but his brain has withered, he has no perception and he has only basic life functions. „Even though I know the Green Party's program will probably move a pig farm, integrate Gypsies, is avidly pro-European, unpatriotic, and infatuated with nonsense like quotas for woman, I still – despite all that drivel – want to run on its ticket because it's the alternative to the consumption fetish that promotes big capital interests,“ declared Green Party election leader for Pardubice Pavel Křívka. Newspapers reported that Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had placed a video with a greeting to „brave terrorists“ on the Internet for the first time. Nigerian Army officials visited the Aero Vodochody arms maker. Jindřich Štyrský's painting Cirkus Simonette was auctioned in Prague for 8.5 million crowns. The world’s largest bank, Tokyo-Mitsubishi, established its first branch in the Czech Republic. The Catholic Church announced that Pope Benedict XVI might soon permit people with AIDS to use condoms. Three Polish miners from the mine Dolu Darkov in Karviná died in one day from heart attacks and heart failure. „The era of cheap and available raw materials has ended. But ask me about the end of civilization in about a hundred years,“ Industry and Trade Minister Milan Urban said in an interview for Právo. Karin was booted from the reality TV show VyVolení. Trees blossomed.