Last week 35/09

The world microlight flying championship was held in the skies above Jihlava. Summer culminated. The famed open-air music festival took place in Trutnov for the 22nd time. Temperatures stabilized at around 30 degrees Celsius. Javelin thrower Barbara Špotáková won a silver medal at the world athletics championships in Berlin. People lost their appetite for milk and Madeta's profits dipped.
"It is a serious issue that should make us prick up our ears and find out how miserable those invaders could make our lives," Jan Šula, director of the Akademie věd České republiky's (Czech Academy of Sciences') entomological institute, said of reports that the South of France had been invaded by aggressive Chinese hornets that prey on bees and which are making their way into the heart of Europe. Banks raised mortgage rates. Tenzin Taklha, a spokesman for the Tibetan government-in-exile, said that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would come to the Czech Republic in September as part of his upcoming trip to Europe. German theatre and film director Peter Zadek died in Hamburg after suffering a long and chronic illness. The Czech government's national economic council (Národní ekonomická rada), set up to tackle the economic crisis, announced the end of its existence. Twenty years passed since the successful "Trabant revolution," in which East Germans fled en masse to the West in their two-stroke vehicles and overthrew the tenacious Communist regime at home. The Czech Republic expelled two spies working at the Russian embassy in Prague and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described it as "another Czech provocation"; Lavrov declined to explain what the alleged previous "provocations" were.
"None of the Russians gave me anything, I did not even get one ruble; I have always fought against the radar for free, from my own conviction and with my own money," said Jan Neoral, who founded the Liga starostové proti radaru ("League of Mayors Against the Radar"), in response to press speculation that the expelled spies had organized and incited protests against the planned US radar base in Brdy. The price of sugar rose. Prague councilors passed an ordinance prohibiting non-stop bars from serving beer to those who refuse to play their gambling machines at night. So far six people have visited the Litvínov police to declare themselves the rightful owners of an envelope containing 50,000 crowns that a local homeless man, Zdeněk Horváth, had found while searching for food in the garbage and virtuously turned over to the police. Finance Minister Eduard Janota told the public that unless major steps were taken, the budget deficit for next year would reach a record high of 250 billion crowns and that the Czech Republic would find itself on the "Hungarian road" - the brink of bankruptcy.
"We have long been putting off the painful steps; now we have pension reform, healthcare reform, public finance reform and deficit reform, which we became addicted to at a time when there was a surplus; the mistake did not occur just now, it was accumulated in the past," economist Tomáš Sedláček told Hospodářské noviny, commenting on the caretaker government's proposal to raise taxes and reduce government spending to quell the perilously rising levels of the budget deficit and public debt. In a referendum, the vast majority of Rozhozná residents rejected the government's plan to build a storage facility for potentially deadly nuclear waste in the village. Jakub Tomeš of Česká Třebová became the first armless Czech citizen in history to receive a driving license. Czech breweries' sales of keg beer declined substantially. Police arrested and charged four men with committing an arson attack on a house inhabited by a Roma family in Vítkov last spring; three of the accused confessed and testified that the "action" - in which a two-year-old girl suffered severe injuries with life-long consequences - was carefully planned so that it would kill as many people, including children, as possible. The Air France-KLM consortium announced that it is not interested in buying the collapsing national carrier ČSA Czech Airlines.
"Our goal is to save about 800 million crowns in a year - and if I were to add to that additional expenses, such as chairs, pencils, etc., we will save over a billion," the airline's president Radomír Lašák told journalists, explaining how his business could survive without a foreign partner. Letní Letná - an annual festival of new circus and theatre - got underway in Prague's Letná park. The Czech Bishops' Conference (Česká biskupská conference) announced that Pope Benedict XVI would speak to worshippers in a total of four languages during his upcoming visit to the Czech Republic. The Transport Ministry abolished a law obliging drivers to carry a spare tire in their cars.