Last week 22/2006

The swimming season commenced with the opening of swimming pools. Legendary anti-Nazi and anti-communist resistance movement hero František Peřina was buried on Vítkov Hill in Prague. Bakers announced the price of bread would rise. A cinema in Jirkov refused to screen The Da Vinci Code. The army announced it would vacate the military area in Boletice in the Šumava Mountains and politicians decided a mega ski park would be built on the vacated area. “It’s what I’ve always longed for,” said football player Tomáš Rosický, commenting on having been sold from Dortmund to Arsenal. Within three days the Prague stock exchange plummeted, gained, and plummeted again. Czech filmmakers closed their stand at the festival in Cannes to protest the rejection of a law to support cinematography. Daniel Cohn-Bendit visited Prague. Adra Foundation sent a container of humanitarian aid to India. Police officer Tomáš Čermák, who beat a young woman disapprovingly commenting on the passing neo-Nazi march on May Day, was charged with abuse of power of a public official, restricting personal liberty, and bodily harm.

“The complexity of history and human fates in it,” said Petr Žantovský, the well-known journalist-collaborator during the pre-Velvet Revolution normalization period, later ODS propagandist, and interviewer of Prime Minister Václav Klaus, when asked by the Právo daily what the exhibition The Story of Newspapers, which Žantovský just opened in Prague under the patronage of Culture Minister Vítězslav Jandák (Social Democratic Party – ČSSD), was about. Graduation ball season began. A study by anti-pirating institutions revealed that four out of ten Czechs use illegal software. The European Union welcomed the founding of a new country – Montenegro, which separated from Serbia in a nationwide referendum. The eighth annual Khamoro festival of Roma culture was held in Prague. Like last year, the Senate nominated the brothers Ctirad and Josef Mašín, who fought against communism here during the worst period of red terror in the early 1950’s, and ultimately successfully fought their way to the free zone in the American sector of Berlin, for the highest state honor – the Order of the White Lion. “If I were to add up all those who were sentenced to death here – including those who were sentenced in equity, that is, not in political trials – then many more people died during the eight-minute American air raid on Prague at the end of World War II than in the 1950’s,” Communist Party Chairman Vojtěch Filip declared in an interview for Hospodářské noviny. “I read the communist newspaper Hálo noviny regularly, just as I do the other papers, and I have to say that Lidové noviny is much less palatable,” Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek (ČSSD) said of his reading preferences in an interview for Hospodářské noviny. The Czech Sokol Community chose for its upcoming gathering at Strahov Stadium the song Rozkvětla louka (Meadow in Bloom) by Michal David, the author of the winning song Poupata (Bud), which was applauded on the same spot twenty years ago at the nationwide Spartakiada. During his visit to Estonia President Václav Klaus pronounced that the European Union should give up its integration efforts and remain an alliance of strong nation states. The first porcini mushrooms sprung up in the woods. The Supreme Court in Brno ordered the Regional Court in Ostrava to fully rehabilitate Vladimír Hučín. The Green Party presented to the public a petition to restrict semi-truck transport and increase the use of trains for long-distance shipping. Sazka’s profit surged. The Czech search engine Atlas declared it would gain on Seznam within two years. A Prague Court arrived at the conclusion that although actor Jan Kanyza had some eighty meetings with State Security Service (StB) agents between 1975 and 1983 and even meet them in safe houses, he had been “unwarrantedly” included on the list of StB informants, and the court ordered the Interior Ministry to touch up his name from the related historical official documents. “I am a visitor in all the universes I reside in, in which I am at home – and when I’m visiting somewhere else, I am just as at home there as I am at home,” Brno visual artist Jan Sytař wrote in a journal entry that was recently published in the monthly magazine Uší a vítr (Ears and Wind). After analyzing ice samples of from Antarctica two international teams of climatologists concluded that global warming will be as much as 78 % worse than thought so far and that by the end of the century the temperature could rise by up to 8° C. The National Theatre staged Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The price of flats in Ostrava went up.