Last week 37/2007

A warm spell was followed by wind, cold, and heavy rain. The first snow fell on Mt. Klínovec, in the Beskydy Mountains, and in the Krkonoše range. Prague submitted an official application to host the 2016 Olympics. The national debt climbed to one billion crowns and the annual interest on it crept up to 47 billion. Two trains collided in Vodňany, injuring thirteen people. The price of electricity in the Czech Republic caught up with Germany’s rate. It came to light that some 250 million crowns vanished without a trace during the closing of the Ministry of Informatics, leaving no trail in the available documents. Headhunters declared that the Czech Republic is out of bosses.

“But I don’t want, I don’t want, I really don’t want to comment on it; for me, that chapter is closed,” replied Jiří Paroubek, chairman of the Social Democratic Party, to reporter Michaela Jilková’s inquiry, “When you recently exchanged your wife of 28 years for a younger woman, you declared that nobody in the Czech Republic has thus far had the courage to go through with a divorce like that. What makes you unique, what it is that nobody else in the Czech Republic has done?” Griffin vulture settled on top of a garbage dump in Vyskytná. At Lidl supermarkets, commercial inspectors found potato chips and yogurt brimming with poisons and carcinogens. At the same time, the amount of cancer causing substances in Sport Line shampoo was found to be one thousand times over the limit. Interest in Czech government bonds waned. Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek kept his promise and submitted a budget with a deficit of less than 3 percent of the GDP – 71 billion crowns – to parliament. The management of Starwood, a luxurious hotel chain, decided to open the first Czech Sheraton Hotel in Prague. Media reported on the latest regulation of the Chinese occupation authorities called, “Decree Regulating the Reincarnation Process,” under which all reincarnations of living Buddhas in Tibet must be approved by the communist government in Beijing; the news caused a wave of protest against the upcoming Beijing Olympics, even in the Czech Republic.

“China’s hosting of the Olympics outraged me even back then, when the Olympic committee decided; I was in high school at the time and I knew from lectures how the Chinese were suppressing the Tibet – and that fact alone irks me to no end,” pronounced Barbora Špotáková, the new world champion in javelin throwing. Medvídek (Teddy Bear) came to the cinemas. After being detained for seven months, Parnaz Azímová, a Prague-based reporter for Radio Free Europe and U.S. citizen, was given back her passport by Iranian authorities and permitted to leave the country where she had traveled from Prague at the beginning of the year to visit her ailing mother. A tug-of-war over deputies’ seats broke out in the governing coalition. AAA Auto listed its stock on the domestic stock exchange. A strike of a local airline confined Czech communist European MP Jiří Maštálek in Ilulissat, Greenland above the polar circle, where, according to an official communiqué, he was looking into the “consequences of global warming.” Employment Minister Petr Nečas approached the cabinet with a proposal to make working under the table a criminal offence. A truck carrying forty greyhounds no longer able to race arrived in the Czech Republic from Ireland. “They know just two things – a one by two meter cage and racing; when they can serve no more, the only thing awaiting them is the sentence – death, most often a bullet to the head or strangulation in a noose thrown over a tree limb,” explained Lucie Miričová of Greyhound Adoption, which organizes the transport from Ireland and then distributes the dogs to families wanting to care for them. Havlíčkův Brod opened a photo exhibition from its twin city, Brixen, France. In Hrušovany nad Jevišovkou, a 13-year-old pupil died while sniffing lighter fluid. Václav Havel was named “Man of the Year of Central and Eastern Europe” at the Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland. To mark the opening the school year, President Václav Klaus visited an elementary school in Sadská and received the title “honorary pupil” after giving a speech to first-graders. The Interspar supermarket chain began offering its customers shopping bags made of potato starch. A Czech-American group of scholars ascertained that the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago after two massive asteroids collided between Mars and Jupiter. Media reported that according to a scientific survey the Arctic lost a record amount of ice this year, and that in just 23 years it would probably lost it all. A revolution occurred in schools: state-imposed curricula were abandoned and every institution began teaching according to its own plans.