Last week 38/2007

Six years passed since the day Al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York with hijacked planes and murdered three thousand people inside.

The media reported that Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell ran the 100 meters in a record 9.74 seconds.The number of borreliosis cases climbed. Teachers demonstrated in front of the government office about their low salaries.

„The talks are complicated because we have limits that cannot be exceeded, and he has a British studio, Italian designers, and American structural designers; it's all a matter of performance and price,“ said Vlastimil Ježek, director of the National Library, describing how his institution has progressed in negotiations on the cost of the new building designed by Czech-British architect Jan Kaplický, which experts say can cost no more than 150 million crowns. The Czech currency hit a record high against the dollar - 19.75 crowns to one US dollar. Employment offices announced a record 134,000 available jobs. Czech Philharmonic conductor Zdeněk Mácal unexpectedly quit his job during a tour of Austria due to disagreements with the orchestra's management. The city of Havlíčkův Brod entered into a twinning partnership with Brixen in the Trentino-South Tyrol of northern Italy. The police started looking into whether entrepreneur Tomáš Pitr, who was once among the biggest minions of the Czech political elite only to later become an inconvenient „enemy of the state“ and receive a five-year sentence for an old loan fraud, actually did flee to South Africa or whether he is hiding out with other escapees of the Czech business demimonde somewhere else.

„Why would illegal refugees make their way across a green border when they could just drive across an unguarded border crossing,“ wrote Vienna's Die Presse, commenting on a joint idea of Austria’s interior and defense ministers to have Austrian army soldiers „preventively“ guard the Austrian-Czech and Austrian-Hungarian borders even after those two countries become part of Europe's border-free region in January. „Porsche“ trams began operating in Brno. Unemployment remained at its longtime level of 6.5 percent. A 45-year-old Slovak citizen admitted that he had completely made up his recent statement to the police that he had been assaulted and brutally beaten by a group of Roma after refusing to give away a cigarette; the police discovered that the „assaulted“ man had de facto caused his own injuries in a classic pub brawl with his friends. The government decided to sell Czech Airlines and Prague's airport. Bavarian interior minister and soon-to-be head of government Günther Beckstein visited Prague. Bureaucrats in Brussels sharply criticized the Czech Republic again for its inability to stop squandering public money.

The police proposed that the authorities tolerate a little alcohol in drivers' blood. „Alcohol doesn't belong behind the wheel, mommy and daddy! That's true, but 0.2 permille [0.02% blood alcohol content] – is that alcohol behind the wheel?“ wrote Karel Steigerwald, welcoming the police proposal in an opinion piece for Mladá fronta Dnes, which concluded that punishing a driver for having 0.2 permille „has just one intent: to humiliate a person.“ Gojko Mitić opened the fifth annual Festivalu evropských filmových úsměvů (Festival of European Film Smiles) in Mladá Boleslav. An unknown arsonist set fire to three haystacks in the countryside nearby Tachov. An inquiry into old documents confirmed that the Czechoslovak army had nuclear weapons and that the local command was to deliver 130 nuclear strikes to various countries in Western Europe in the event of a general attack on the free world. Moravian distillers announced a catastrophic plum crop failure.

„It is our artistic intent – we work with virtual reality and don't want to show real outer space,“ said Česká televize (Czech Television) spokesperson Anna Freimanová in response to geodesists' complaints that the Earth model featured in the introduction to the TV station's news programs spins in the wrong direction. The Constitutional Court upheld a suit brought by Supreme Court chairwoman Iva Brožová and ordered justice Jaroslav Bureš to immediately step down as vice-chair of the Constitutional Court, a position to which he was unlawfully appointed by President Václav Klaus, who then called the Constitutional Court verdict a „threat to democracy.“ After avian flu, mad cow disease struck herds in the Zálší na Orlickoústecku factory farming cooperative. Two Czech citizens were arrested at a neo-Nazi demonstration against the „Islamization of Europe“ in Brussels. A mob of people looted the Czech diplomatic mission in Kinshasa, Congo. Přibyslav hosted five thousand firefighters.

In Prague, a divorce was granted to Social Democratic Party chairman Jiří Paroubek, who left his wife of 28 years and procured a new, blonde wife who is 25 years younger.