Last week 23/08

After rainy days came tropical heat. The American space probe Phoenix landed on the northern hemisphere of Mars and began searching for water under its surface for the next manned flights. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek went on holiday to Italy. Meat prices dropped. By a one-vote majority, the constitutional court ruled that fees for visiting doctors are constitutional, and the dissenting justices then called their institution's verdict „anti-constitutional.“ Gipsy.cz released a new album, Reprezent. Top-seeded Czech tennis player Nicole Vadišová dropped out in the first round of the French Open. Serbia's ambassador left Prague in protest at the Czech government's recognition of Kosovo. The government passed a law commanding the army to take care of and support its war veterans. The management of the Czech football association apologized to their Lithuanian equivalent and the Lithuanian Embassy on behalf of the organizers of a friendly match between the Czech and Lithuanian national teams in Prague, who erroneously flew the Latvian flag above the stadium and played the Latvian national anthem at the match. „My husband's got fluid, you'd be surprised,“ Petra Paroubková, the new wife of the former prime minister and current Social Democratic Party chairman, said of her husband's appeal. Expensive oil raised the cost of bus travel. Two activists on hunger strike in Prague in protest against the Czech government's plan to locate a US radar base in Brdy were weighed at the Thomayerova nemocnice hospital on their 11th day and, despite weight loss, wanted to continue their protest. Tomáš Ujfaluši was named captain of the Czech national football team for the 2008 European championship. Sydney Pollack passed away. After 60 years of wavering, the authorities finally decided to build a memorial to the heroes who carried out the assassination of the top-ranking Nazi officer Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. It was found that more women than men suffer from heart attacks in the Czech Republic. German police pursued a fleeing Czech car thief all the way from Munich to Tachov. Prague city hall passed a by-law banning people from spitting gum on sidewalks and streets in the capital, an offence which carries a fine of 30,000 crowns. Twenty-five people died in just one week on Czech roads and traffic police chief Martin Červíček called it an „exceptional fluctuation“ for which adopting defensive measures would not do any good; meanwhile, the Transport Ministry is calling on traffic officers „not to unnecessarily harass“ drivers who „only slightly“ violate regulations - for example, by driving 53 instead of the legal 50 kilometers per hour through towns.

Newspapers reported that the Czech Republic would need more offices in the future. Nick Cave sang at the Sparta Praha hockey arena in Prague. The Interior Ministry started preparing to register football hooligans. Brussels raised European parliamentarians' salary by 100 percent - to 175,000 crowns per month. The Czech army stopped its celebrated takeover of Tatra Kopřivnice trucks because water was found to leak into the vehicles through the hatch. France opened its labor market to Czechs. An international conference on the „European vision“ took place in Prague; at it, the former Czech president said that the EU would be better off seeking „spiritual rehabilitation“ rather than chasing economic growth. „We people really haven't changed, we are not a hair better than our fathers and grandfathers who allowed Auschwitz, gulags and Srebenice - man is and remains a wicked, carnivorous monkey, who gets pleasure from the killing of his fellow man,“ said Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg at the same conference in a speech where he presented historical examples as a warning against the consequences of passivity towards tyranny and human rights violations. The Czech police concluded their investigation of Josef Vondruška, who was a prison warden in the Communist era and is now a Communist parliamentary deputy, and proposed charges against him for torturing political prisoners in the 1980s. Cheb Mayor Jan Svoboda and Reinhard Führer, chairman of Germany's association for the care of wartime graves, signed an agreement to establish a German war burial ground in Cheb's cemetery. The Health Ministry prepared for a Cabinet debate on a bill that would give people the right to decide on their death. Meteorologists announced that the current summer weather would last at least another week.