Last week 28/2007

News agencies reported on a new terrorist attack in Britain, where an al-Qaida commando attempted to kill hundreds of people at a discotheque in London and at Glasgow Airport; thanks to defense precautions and citizens' vigilance, however, the attempt was unsuccessful. Summer-holiday travel fever began. With a salary of 10 million dollars per season, Scott Gomez replaced Jaromír Jágr (8.3 million) as the best-paid NHL player. Artistic blacksmiths gathered in Náměšt’. ČEZ decided to discontinue importing nuclear fuel for Temelín from the USA and to import it from Russia instead „for the sake of savings and trouble-free operation.“

„To draw the longbow a bit, we can compare our endeavor to traveling along the DNA helix to the past,“ geneticist Daniel Vaněk said to the media as an introduction to a new project in which he and his colleagues will cut the bones of old corpses buried in tombs in the Prague Castle in order to discover which of them belong to the Přemyslids and to determine who, exactly, the Přemyslids were after all. The counting of all the fowl in the Břeclav district threatened with indiscriminate slaughter due to the imminence of bird flu came to an end. The new Fabia Combi hit the roads. Tom Stoppard celebrated his 70th birthday and Gina Lollobrigida her 80th. Physicians warned the public of a proliferation of ticks. Sixty-five years passed since the Nazis executed Czech resistance hero Colonel Josef Mašín. Meteorological measurements revealed that this June was the warmest in the last 70 years. At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech President Václav Klaus introduced his favorite film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, shot by British documentary director Martin Durkin, associated in the past with the think tank Living Marxism, which became famous in the 1990s for its claims that the genocide in Rwanda and concentration camps in Bosnia never existed and that they were just a „conspiracy by the media.“ „This one-sided campaign reminds me of similar spinning under Communism,“ said Klaus in reaction to references to the film director's resumé. Ivan Pinkava's „Maximal Photography“ was exhibited at Rajská zahrada. The fourth annual „Scrap Yards vs Gypsies“ (Sběrny proti Cigánům) soccer derby took place in Telč, where the Romany team defeated scrap-yard workers and owners 4–3; both teams and their fans then celebrated the victory with a musical hootenanny in a garage in the local ghetto. The Czech Army ended its mission in Bosnia, where it was part of the European Union's peacekeeping forces. The Mlékárna Kunín dairy was taken over by the French company Lactalis. The head of the opposition Social Democrats, Jiří Paroubek (55) told the media that he had informed his wife Zuzana (50) that he had decided to leave her after 28 years of marriage. „Until now, nobody in the Czech Republic has had the courage for something like that, for such a form of honorable divorce. People will appreciate my openness,“ said Paroubek – who has started seeing his interpreter, Petra Kováčová (34) – commenting on his divorce in the daily newspaper Právo. Operators unbridled the speed of internet connections. This year's Andrej Stankovič prize for an exceptional documentary was bestowed on A Crime Called Katyn (Zločin jménem Katyň ) by director Petra Všelichová. The governing Civic Democrats (ODS) proposed that the slump in the public budget anticipated in connection with the party's previous proposal to introduce lower taxes could be balanced out by raising the price of food, public transport, heat, medicine, and water. Newspapers reported that after a two-month stay, popular singer Richard Müller went home from the Košice psychiatric hospital, where he had undergone treatment for a mood disorder characterized by alternating states of exorbitant happiness and deep depression. The financial authorities in Ostrava imposed a half-million-crown fine on the local mining company OKD for overcharging for coke deliveries to residential customers in 2004 and 2005. The Interior Ministry arrested a group of traffic police officers in Prague and charged them with taking kickbacks for passing business on to various garages while investigating car accidents. „The sick cells recuperated“ – German scientist Joachim Hauber, quoted in Mladá fronta Dnes, whose team allegedly made a major breakthrough in the search for a cure for AIDS when they managed to carve up a DNA strand in an affected cell with „molecular scissors“ then put it back together again – without, of course, the deadly HIV virus's genetic codes. The deputy mayor of the Brno district of Královo Pole, René Pelán (ODS), used a sander to remove the Communist hammer-and-sickle symbol from a memorial to fallen Red Army soldiers in Brno, and the Russian Embassy voiced a sharp protest against his actions. In an attempt to help holidaymakers, Mladá fronta Dnes issued a two-page „Vermin Map“ with the sub-headline, „Where you'll find ticks and where you'll find bears.“