Last week 40/2006

Students returned to college dormitories. Sixty-five years passed since Kiev’s Babi Yar massacre. The European Union announced it would expand to include Romania and Bulgaria on January 1 of next year. Ramadan began. Former Czech president Václav Havel received an award in Passau, Germany for his contribution to understanding between nations. The government approved the budget for 2007 once the finance ministry had cut the planned deficit from 130 billion to 91 billion crowns. “I didn’t expect to skate through such a tragedy; in my opinion, it’s a mild decision,” remarked actor Marián Labuda, commenting on the suspended sentence and 30-month driving ban he received from a Žďár court for failing to brake in time, running over, and killing two women last year while driving too fast in heavy snowfall on an ice-covered D1 highway.

The Prague Zoo celebrated its 75th anniversary. Cherry trees blossomed in the record-warm fall. President Václav Klaus went to Mongolia. Czech opera singer Magdalena Kožená presented her new album of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arias in Prague. Newspapers reported that the leadership of the Egyptian Islamic organization al-Gama’a Islamiya had decisively denied the recent claim of Usama bin Laden’s sidekick sheik al-Zawahiri that their group had joined al-Qaeda. “No, we won’t join them because their goal is jihad, while ours is Islam,” the press cited an Al-Gama’a Islamiya leader, Nageh Ibrahim. “An anonym called us and said there was gunfire by the pond; we came there and found them tossed in a heap hidden in the brush. And someone had sawed off all their beaks,” said Petr Mückstein, zoologist for the Žďárské vrchy (Žďár Hills) protected landscape area, describing the scene at a water reservoir near Nové Veselí where an unknown poacher had gunned down five gray herons. A warning of a threat of terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in the Czech Republic delivered to Prague by allied intelligence services alarmed the government and launched the police into a state of emergency. Environment Minister Petr Kalaš dismissed State Environmental Fund director Andrej Mudray. The Austrian association Atomstopp Oberösterreich warned the public on both sides of the Czech-Austrian border that its members would react to all further breakdowns at the Temelín nuclear power plant with blockades at the border crossings. The disparity between incomes grew. The Czech Statistical Office announced that, for the first time in the Czech Republic’s autonomous history, more people are being born than dying. Hindustan Computers Limited commenced negotiations on the possibility of transferring its headquarters from India to the Czech Republic. Statistics on deaths on Czech roadways returned to their usual record numbers (54 deaths in September – just like last year), and the traffic police declared that politicians were to blame for the rapid decline in caution and consideration because of their relentless attacks on the sense of the new point system and their pledges to abolish the inconvenient law as soon as possible. Submachine-gun-armed robbers held up Pema supermarket in Petrovice in the Ústí Region. “Look, if I hadn’t been premier, they wouldn’t have noticed me – and my wife is the wife of the premier,” replied ex-premier Jiří Paroubek to Lidové noviny’s question: “Do you believe it was all right for you to have hired and paid lawyers from state funds to represent you in your personal lawsuits, for example, when you sued the tabloid ridiculing your wife’s appearance?” The National Technical Museum in Prague closed for complete reconstruction for two years. The Czech company Alta won a contract to build the first-ever crematorium in Omsk, a city of one million on the edge of the perpetually frozen Siberia. Czechs commemorated St. Wenceslas Day. News agencies reported that an EADS pilotless jet had crashed during its first test flight in Spain, delivering a huge blow to European efforts to catch up with and overtake the USA and Israel in developing unmanned surveillance aircraft. Vlasta Parkanová, chairwoman of the Christian Democrat group of deputies, was found to be the most popular Czech politician by a regular poll. Ex-premier Stanislav Gross was summoned to the police station as a witness in the case of the hired killing of highly controversial businessman František Mrázek, who, with his associates, was among the Social Democratic government’s favorites and was likewise enmeshed in the suspicious and currently under-investigation privatization of Unipetrol. The Czech Film and Television Academy decided Jan Švankmajer’s movie Lunacy would represent Czech cinematography in the next battle for the Oscar in Hollywood. A census of cyclists was taken in Brno. Venus was visible in morning skies and Saturn in the evening. Insurance companies announced they would raise the cost of liability insurance.