Last week 40/2007

Newspapers reported that, despite massive police crackdowns, the previously browbeaten public had joined Buddhist monks in their uprising against the cruel totalitarian regime in Burma. Two and a half thousand people rode their bikes along Prague’s Magistrál freeway on the occasion of Car Free Day. Education Minister Dana Kuchtová resigned from her post. Josef Čapek’s painting “Girl in Pink Clothes” (1916) was auctioned in Prague for a record 12 million crowns. The Czech Republic officially commenced preparations for its half-year presidency of the European Union.

“They’re probably doing it to me intentionally because of my divergent opinions,” President Václav Klaus was cited in Czech press reports when he, along with other politicians, had to wait in line at the United Nations Headquarters in New York for an entrance pass to the hall where he, as one of a hundred speakers, gave a five-minute speech sharing his view of reality and the causes of global warming. “Foreign reporters in the press center were laughing out loud during his speech: ‘Who is that guy? He can’t be serious’,” reported Mladá Fronta Dnes, describing the reaction of those who listened to the speech in which the Czech president “strongly rejected” the majority view that, in the face of the ongoing climate changes, poisonous gas emissions must be reduced. Afterwards, President Klaus denied a Lidové noviny report that his speech was given no notice at all by the delegates and that the only media to report on it was the Czech press. “That’s not true, after the speech a man who is among the ten – perhaps even five – most influential politicians in the world came up to me and told me that he agrees with me on many points,” Klaus told Lidové noviny. At the end of their meeting in the U.N. headquarters, the world’s heads of state concluded that the changes are largely caused by human activity, which must be drastically changed as soon as possible. Thanks to the selfless help of hundreds of informers from the ranks of ordinary citizens, Heiko, a baboon who had escaped from his cage in the Brno Zoo, was caught on the golf course in Jinačovice after five days on the run. According to the lobbying association for canneries and distillers, Czechs have stopped buying canned goods and taken to buying fresh goods instead. Premier Mirek Topolánek accused journalists of “prying, blackmailing, retaliating, and corruption.” The press had, according to him, committed all that by virtue of looking into who owns the luxurious Volvo which is registered to the premier’s new girlfriend, deputy Lucie Talmanová, but is actually driven by Topolánek, who declared in his personal assets statement that he does not own a car; the publicized revelation that some businessmen whom Topolánek had helped in the past had lent him the money for the Volvo led the premier to implore that “it is time to launch a discussion on a law that would regulate freedom of speech in the Czech Republic.”

“It’s due to the disparity between larger portions and the decline in exercise,” said Petr Suchard, a specialist on obesity, explaining to Mladá Fronta Dnes the mystery of why obesity in the Czech population is constantly increasing despite having a reportedly better and healthier diet now than they did ten years ago. The police unit for fighting organized crime busted up a gang of counterfeiters who specialized in one hundred dollar bills. Ten computer companies submitted proposals for a billion-crown contract to develop an information system for managing and administering the Czech state’s money. Former premier Stanislav Gross, who had to step down before his term was over due to suspicion that his family bills were being financed by money earned from prostitution, bought a one-third stake in Moravia Energo for three hundred million crowns. Social Democratic Party chairman Jiří Paroubek returned from visiting China’s Communist Party during which he discovered the magic of the “spicy Szechwan cuisine” and successfully lobbied for the business projects of his party’s sponsor, ECM Group. “They’re rare, so it will be as expensive as hell,”Antonín Fedorjak, who owns the Ústí nad Labem travel agency Mplus, told a Mladá Fronta Dnes reporter who pretended to be interested in Fedorjak’s company’s online offer to arrange hunting trips for foreign tourists wanting to shoot the stringently protected Eurasian lynx. A miraculous, tear-shedding Russian Virgin Mary icon was put on display in the Eastern Orthodox church on Masaryk Square in Jihlava. A security guard was killed and valuable documents on excavations on the Great Moravian Empire were destroyed in a fire at the depository of the National Memorial of Great Moravia in Mikulčice.