Last week 27/2007

An extra-ordinary eight-hour brain operation performed by doctors at Motol Hospital managed to rid a 16-year-old Slovak girl of epilepsy. A 13-year-old swimmer drowned in the Dyje river near Břeclav. The legionary community reminded citizens that 90 years had passed since Czechoslovak legions triumphantly battled their compatriots in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the celebrated battle of Zborov in the turmoil of World War I. Czech Miss finalists flew to Rhodos. Danny DeVito arrived at the 42nd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Army encircled another industrial poultry-breeding operation in the Ústecko-Orlická Region, and slaughtered a flock of 28,000 birds in which several chickens had been diagnosed as being infected with the deadly H5N1 flu virus.

„There was a crash, the earth shook, tiles fell from the roof – all of us were afraid of what had happened,“ said Vlasta Novotná from Podražnice, near Horšovský Týn, describing the first few minutes after a massive old linden tree guarding a neighboring chapel fell onto her house during a storm. Burger King set its sights on the Czech Republic. The police warned drivers that increased holiday travel combined with a rising number of road closures due to repairs could lead to a traffic collapse in the Czech Republic at the outset of the summer holidays. Cheb instituted a ban on dogs freely roaming in the city. Three young travelers from Brno died when a Cambodian plane on a domestic route crashed near the city of Sihanoukville. The summer sale season began. „I'm telling you straight out, you can't have taxes as low as in Romania and expenditures as high as in Scandinavia,“ declared Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek after the government gave him the task of drafting a new version of the 2008 budget, taking into account Civic Democratic parliamentary deputies' desire to lower taxes in the Czech Republic; Kalousek concurrently announced he would hand in his resignation if he wasn't allowed to draw up a budget with a deficit of less than three percent of the GDP. Thomas Cook entered the Czech tourism market. The independent online cultural broadcaster Radios.cz shot and posted on its website a video of a collaborative performance by Ivan Magor Jirous and the American Indian group Postcommodity in Mutišov near Slavonice. News agencies announced that the iPhone had gone on sale in America. Prague Judge Marie Marková abolished a 60-year old National Court ruling under which famed shoe entrepreneur Jan Antonín Baťa was sentenced to 15 years in prison for alleged collaboration with the Nazis; with her ruling, Judge Marková sided with the survivors, who considered the postwar ruling a lie dreamed up in order that the state could steal Baťa's property. Czech President Václav Klaus signed a law establishing the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. „It contradicts the constitution, which does, after all, protect private ownership,“ Koh-i-noor General Director Pavel Bohumínský said of a Prague court verdict ordering his company to return half of the factory and a collection of rare paintings to the heirs of their original owner, Zikmund Waldes, whose property was first stolen by the Nazis and then the Communists. Instead of returning the property to the family, the post-Velvet Revolution authorities decided to sell it to foreign buyers; after a 13-year legal battle, the court ruled that the state's actions were wrong. „Buying stolen property has its risks; that the original owner will come, for example,“ Tomáš Němeček commented on the court ruling in Hospodářské noviny. Meteorologists taught the public that the current sudden weather changes from sweltering heat to coolness and back again may torment those with heart disease, asthma, and psychological problems. An Italian bank bought IC Banka. Třebíč City Hall declined to allocate a 70,000-crown grant to a local social welfare institution caring for the mentally ill, saying that the money was needed to install a small traffic light in a car playground for healthy children. Because of the occurrence of bird flu in the Czech Republic, Russia prohibited imports of Czech poultry. The European Commission warned the Czech government that it might lose out on part of the 780 billion crowns earmarked for it by the European Union's treasury because of the Czech Regional Development Ministry's inability to establish a clear system and correctly compose applications. The automated teller machine celebrated its 40th birthday. Under unrelenting rain and with great success, the Czech band Gipsy.cz played at the world's largest open-air music festival in Glastonbury, England. The media reported that an international group of scientists had managed to identify a thousand-year-old mummy as that of ancient Egypt's powerful female ruler Queen Hatshepsut, whose successor, the pharaoh Thutmose III, did everything in his power to strike her name from the history books. The supermarket chain Tesco began offering Czech customers a self-cooling beer keg.