Last week 20/08

The media reported that Dmitry Medvedev had taken office as the president of Russia. Due to waning interest in mortgages, apartment prices dropped. A Czech village in Banat, Romania was inundated by dozens of Czech and Slovak tourists. Dagmar Havlová announced that she would not be able to perform in Václav Havel's play Odcházení (Leaving) due to dramatic circumstances. After T-Mobile, Vodafone also announced it would offer iPhones to its customers. Petr Hájek, President Václav Klaus's unpopular-with-reporters spokesperson, is leaving and the presidential office is seeking a new position for him. An international conference on anti-radar defense took place in Prague and was attended by NATO chief Jaap Hoop Scheffer, who welcomed the radar base in the Czech Republic. „It is ruled out that we would support the radar. We still don't know what ‚NATO architecture‘ means,“ said Jiří Paroubek, senator and chairman of the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), adding that his party insists that the radar would be exclusively under the alliance's command. „An approaching rocket will not give us enough time to convene the NATO Council,“ Scheffer pointed out. Prague commemorated the 63rd anniversary of the Prague uprising. Unknown perpetrators stole a kilometer of aluminum soundproofing wall in Starý Lískovec and the highways directorate (Ředitelství silnic a dálnic ČR) informed desperate residents that it did not have the money to replace it. Prague city hall banned a demonstration of right-wing extremists who wanted to march to the Israeli embassy on May 14th, when Israel commemorates the 60th anniversary of its founding. Delta, a well-known Prague live venue, closed. Přerov investigator Milan Šošovička, who was in charge of the Jiří Čunek case and who, according to state prosecutor Salichov, was purposefully going after the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) chairman's jugular vein, was promoted to head of a special anti-corruption force in Olomouc. Václav Pačes, chairman of the Akademie věd ČR (Czech Academy of Sciences), announced that he would not run for the post of chairman again because he wants to devote himself to research.

„I was and am influenced. It is much more controversial than it seemed at first,“ Pačes, who is a member of an independent commission judging the country's energy options, told Hospodářské noviny; his colleague from the commission Eduard Sequens added that politicians are requesting a green light to break the limits on coal mining and constructing more nuclear power plants. The techno party in Uzenice na Strakonicku ended. The Prague 3 Court ruled that novelist Jaroslav Foglar's will is valid; however, even this fourth court verdict does not end the dispute because the writer's nephew appealed the ruling. Mirek Topolánek visited Czech soldiers in Afghanistan. In Hradec Králové, a businesswoman was arrested while delivering 1.5 million crowns to local tax authority clerks as a bribe for being lenient on her during an upcoming tax audit. „I met with three court experts and each of them confirmed that if I signed something like that, I could get 12, not a thousand, but still, years in prison,“ said Vlastimil Tlustý on Česká televise (Czech Television), explaining why he is and will be against church restitution, without even naming the court experts he referred to; thanks to him and three other ODS deputies, restitution was removed from the parliamentary agenda. Officials of South Korean automaker Hyundai screened a film for residents of Nošovice, North Moravia, in a local restaurant in which they cheerfully announced that there would soon be 3,000 workers from the nearby factory „paving Europe with Hyundai vehicles.“ The Právo newspaper reported that up to 600,000 Czechs may be addicted to alcohol. The Education Ministry negotiated a half-billion-crown increase in wages for teachers but the trade union is considering a strike because it wanted three billion. Newspapers reported that the Burmese junta had confiscated the only humanitarian aid that had successfully made its way into the country in reaction to the devastating cyclone; according to unofficial reports, the cyclone could take the lives of up to one hundred thousand very poor people. České dráhy (Czech Railways) announced it would raise ticket prices as a result of rising oil prices. Ireland's supreme court agreed to extradite two members of the Berdych gang, Tomáš Půta and Maroš Šulej, to the Czech Republic. Slavia football club returned to Eden.