Last week 25/08

In the biggest surge in history so far, the price of oil shot up by $11 a barrel, to $139. Europe was jarred by blockades of truck drivers protesting rising fuel prices. „It's a new Czech record,“ said Miroslav Marek, president of the Dobrý den agency in Pelhřimov, commenting on the performance of 10 young people who smeared quick-acting glue on the soles of their shoes and then pressed their feet on the ceiling of Pelhřimov's cultural center and managed to hang upside down for 10 seconds. The regional court in Hradec Králové denied the noble Harrach family's restitution claims. Bob Dylan played in Ostrava. A team of experts from the anti-monopoly office, the Úřad pro ochranu hospodářské soutěže, began investigating whether travel agencies are swindling customers with their inconceivably high „supplementary fuel charges,“ which they have suspiciously imposed simultaneously. Hospital directors across the company were fired. Outgoing US President George W. Bush traveled to Slovenia during his farewell trip to Europe. The media published the results of the American company Mercer Consulting's 2008 ranking of cities with the best quality of life; as usual, Zurich topped the list, while Baghdad came in last; Prague ranked 71st out of 250 cities. After scorching heat came rains. „Those questions make me sad,“ replied Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek's wife Pavla Topolánková when asked by the press why her civil association, Becario, gets sponsors to finance studies for underprivileged students, yet in practice spends most of the donated funds on its own operation and on organizing various golf tournaments; Topolánková was asked the „sad questions“ before a public discussion in Prague, „Women in the Non-Profit Sector,“ to which she arrived in a government limousine with a chauffeur and a police escort. Firefighters saved a drowning woman who had fallen into the Elbe river from Eliščino nábřeží („Eliška's Embankment“) in the center of Hradec Králové. Legal iPhones arrived in Europe. The army removed Greenpeace activists from a piece land in the military zone in Brdy who had occupied the place in protest against construction of a US radar base and declared it the „independent state of Peaceland.“

„Many years ago, as a young theologian, I would have said: ‚We will never forget what we have come to know and lived through.; But today I would choose to put it differently: 'For next time, I would only hope there will be more of those who do not succumb,‘“ said Joachim Gauck, pastor and head of Germany's Stasi file authority, in response to Respekt's question, „With regard to our experiences with Communism and Nazism, do you think people would be more resistant today if there were put to the same test again?“ The Czech Justice Ministry concluded its proposal for a new civil code and called on the public to submit their comments on it by the end of August. The government released 115 billion crowns from the national budget for the biggest contract in this electoral term – to repair the damage that was done to the countryside and nature under Communism. Drugs for high blood pressure and cardiac problems became more expensive. Half of Czech schools closed for one day in protest against low teachers' salaries. Railway labor union leaders announced that all trains would come to a halt for one hour on June 24th unless legislators pass a bill enabling early retirement for railway workers. Unemployment dropped below five percent. Statisticians announced that in the last year, in Cyprus alone, a million migratory birds of various protected species were killed and eaten as delicacies in local restaurants during their annual migration to and from their winter habitats in Africa. Kaufland became the most shopped-at supermarket in the Czech Republic. Attempting to catch his plane to the Czech national football team's match in Switzerland, Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek careened down the highway from Brno to Prague at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour. „We had the beacon on, I have no reason to apologize. And moreover - I am not the driver, I do not determine how fast my car goes,“ Topolánek subsequently told critics who reproached him for needlessly and arrogantly breaking the law, and moreover, putting the lives of other motorists in danger. A group of secret investors from K Brewery bought Pivovar Klášter. Budvar's gross profit rose. Newspapers reported that female albatrosses can get by without males if necessary. A survey conducted by the opinion polling agency CVVM showed that the number of Czechs in favor of euthanasia has risen. Czech digital television began broadcasting. The first three members of the recently founded Přátelé Miloše Zemana („Friends of Miloš Zeman“) association announced that Miloš Zeman is to make a comeback.