Last week 27/08

Nine deaf and blind students from Masarykova univerzita (Masaryk University) in Brno left for Greece to climb Mount Olympus. After tropical heat came thunderstorms. The clean-up of damage wrought by hurricane Emma was completed. The website of the US magazine Foreign Policy ranked former Czech president Václav Havel among the 100 most influential intellectuals in the world. Labor unions held a one-hour general strike in protest against the government's public finance reform. „I rang my keys on Wenceslas Square in 1989. But had I known then that this country would be pilfered the way it has, I would have thrown those keys into the sewer,“ said Michal Řehák, who drives tram number 4 in Prague, according to a report in the Právo newspaper, to passengers who became angry when he suddenly stopped his tram and went on strike for an hour. Interest in hybrid cars increased. After being knocked out of the Euro 2008 football championship, members of the national football team tussled with discontent fans at Kozička, a bar in the center of Prague. The Czech national grass-scything championship took place on a meadow near Malá Vrbka. Prague was visited by famous novelist and thinker Slavenka Drakulić. The number of Czech dollar millionaires reached 17,000. The Czech chapter of Greenpeace and its envoys to the miniature state of Peaceland in Bohemia's Brdy hills did not comment on the Russian general staff's announcement that the Russian army would begin training for future combat over the mineral-rich Arctic, to which Russia recently brought a surprising and unlawful claim despite protests from the international community. „Modern wars are won or lost long before they break out,“ Lieutenant General Vladimir Shamanov, who heads the Russian Defense Ministry's Arctic training directorate, informed Peaceland's representatives. Yellow Sisters singer Lucie Hawa Goldin, former deputy ombudswoman Anna Šabatová and former Education Minister Dana Kuchtová both refused food for one day in protest against the planned construction of the US radar base in Brdy. The juvenile delinquency rate dropped. Ten-thousand people visited the „celebration of scents and flavors“ that is the Prague Food Festival, on the Slovanský ostrov river island. Transport Minister Aleš Řebíček drew up a draft amendment raising the speed limit on highways from 130 to 160 kilometers per hour. Outside the cathedral on Brno's Petrov hill, priests blessed the cars of those who were interested as confirmation that God would protect them on their travels. During the weekend seven motorcyclists died on Czech roads. An unidentified poacher slaughtered five helpless marsh harrier chicks, a protected species, at Zadní pond near Tachov. The Prague Stock Exchange plunged by 10 percent. Newspapers reported that the British company GotWind had finished developing a mobile-phone charger that harnesses energy produced by body movement - through dancing, running, or walking with a rolling gait.

„They couldn't have been deported anywhere since they left Czechoslovakia voluntarily,“ said the Česká správa sociálního zabezpečení (ČSSZ, Czech Social Security Administration), explaining why it refuses to comply with the law and pay compensation to Czechoslovak citizens who were deported to Soviet labor camps in Siberia in the 1940s; by „voluntary departure,“ ČSSZ's civil servants mean, for example, that these people left Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for the Soviet Union with the intention of fighting against Hitler but were instead arrested and sent to Siberia where they were imprisoned in Gulags. Parliament's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, approved raising the retirement age to 65 for today's 40-year-olds. The Czech Republic became a member of the European Space Agency and the media encouraged Czech citizens to apply for astronaut training. Astronomer Jan Hradský lectured on why our galaxy is curved at the University of the Third Age in Uherské Hradiště. At the Olomouc zoo, Abéni, a newborn Rothschild giraffe from the zoo's imprisoned herd, was „christened.“ Lenny Kravitz declared his new „love revolution“ at a concert in Prague. „They slapped me on the back in praise, saying ‚well done, old fellah, it's only once every five years a whopper like that is snared around here‘,“ Karel Vymětal told Myslivost litovelský (Litovel Hunting) magazine, describing his experience in Siberia, where his friends sent him on a bear-hunting trip as a retirement gift. A total of 3,168 years passed since the Sun eclipsed the Earth and Odysseus returned home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. More Czech tourists falling off peaks were rescued in Slovakia's High Tatras.