Last week 34/2007

The Perseids whizzed across night skies. With a smile and full of vigor, Mrs. Marie Máčalová celebrated her 105th birthday in the southern Moravian town of Kobylí. Ninety-nine soldiers from the 41st Mechanized Battalion Žatec departed for their four-month mission in Iraq. The presbytery in St. Barbora's cathedral in Kutná Hora was repaired.

The Chamber of Deputies approved the government's tax and public-finance reform package. A police commando detected and occupied the largest domestic marijuana growing operation in Trstěnice near Cheb. „In my eyes, this gesture is a cynical and selfish act,“ said the wife of Social Democratic chairman Jiří Paroubek, commenting on the actions of her husband, who not only recently left her, but has since been announcing in magazines that as soon as he obtains a speedy divorce he will marry his new, quarter-century-younger girlfriend, Petra Kováčová, who has just purchased a new flat for five million crowns. A group of Prague homeless people staged and performed Faust on Petřín hill. A mountaineer from Vrchlabí died while trying to reach the summit of Gasherbrum in the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan. In the area around Ústí nad Orlicí, a quarantine imposed due to the discovery of the bird flu virus was lifted, and authorities informed large breeders that they could bring new chicks to their factory farms left vacant after mass extermination. The US mortgage market crisis affected the Prague Stock Exchange together with other markets around the world. Heinz Bath, a war criminal who participated in the Ležáky massacre during World War II, passed away in Berlin. Lázně Luhačovice lost its legal battle with Léčivé vody over the right to use the name „Vincentka“ for its mineral water. In the exact same place where florist Marie Bartošová disappeared forever in a crater hollowed by water leaking from a broken pipe 30 years earlier, Brno's Pekařská street caved in again; this time nobody was harmed. „It was a regular traffic inspection, I did a foolish thing, but now I can't remember what the breathalyzer measured,“ Civic Democratic parliamentary deputy Ondřej Plašil, who police caught driving drunk one week ago, told reporters; the chamber's mandate committee has been asked to decide whether to strip him of immunity so he may be penalized; besides Plašil, the committee should also decide on the immunity of Communist deputy Josef Vondruška, who faces charges of cruelly persecuting and tyrannizing political prisoners while he was a warden at the infamous Communist-era Minkovice prison; Vondruška rejects the accusation, claiming he never persecuted anyone, only „commanded respect“ from „enemies“ of the regime. Tumbling furniture saved the lives of two children sleeping in a house in Březová nad Svitavou when a truck ploughed through their room. „We need digital voice sirens that would sound when necessary, announcing that a flood wave, a cloud of dangerous toxins, or a hurricane, is approaching,“ declared Chamber of Deputies Chairman Miloslav Vlček upon returning from an inspection tour of the Czech Republic, during which he found that most residents do not know the meaning of the warning signals sounded by sirens today. Sixty years passed since the partition of British India. In an evaluation of the quality of the world's best universities, Charles University ranked between 203rd and 304th place, while no other Czech higher education institutions made it into the top 500. The 10th annual Folklor bez hranic („Folklore Without Borders“) music festival took place in Ostrava. The antivirus company Eset informed computer users that the greatest computer threat is still, for the third month running, the Ani.Gen trojan, which exploits vulnerabilities in the latest version of Windows. Four swans died on ponds outside of Břeclav in one week for reasons unknown. After Moshe Chaim Koller's move to Prague, Brno's Jewish community placed an ad for a new rabbi. Due to the water level dipping below the critical minimum due to drought, the Šumava national park's management banned water-sports enthusiasts from using the upper reaches of the Vltava river. Archeologists unearthed a young mammoth's baby tooth in the Balcarka cave in Moravský kras.