Last week 41/2007

Newspapers reported that the army had quashed the revolution of monks, students, and free-thinking people in Burma by means of killing and violence. A showcase of walking robots opened the 49th International Engineering Trade Fair in Brno. “Refrigerators and washing machines will be the big Christmas Eve hits,” Hospodářské noviny elaborated on behind-the-scenes consumer sales information that domestic electronics equipment prices would drop to record lows before Christmas. A price war between Student Agency and Asiana drove the price of Prague-Brno bus tickets down to 50 crowns. Near Žďár nad Sázavou, genetically altered potatoes were harvested for the first time. As expected, Russia’s nominee to head the International Monetary Fund, Czech banker Josef Tošovský, was defeated in the competition by the pan-European candidate, French banker Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The media council voted to permit product advertising in TV serials. The Social Democratic party’s leadership decided to financially support its chairman Jiří Paroubek, who, with his seventy-thousand-crown deputy’s salary, got into trouble after divorcing his wife of 28 years and finding himself another, quarter-century his junior, woman. “It’s possible that my colleagues are considering it, but I know nothing about it,” Paroubek commented on his party’s plans for the press. Members of the neo-fascist group Autonomous Nationalists of Central Bohemia demonstrated in Kladno against ethnic minorities and the American radar base. After a two-hour man-hunt, three Austrian police departments, equipped with thermal vision and augmented by throngs of volunteer firefighters with dogs, managed to apprehend a Czech man who had taken cover in a cornfield after stealing three pairs of shoes in the Haid shopping mall near Linz. Detectives from the organized crime fighting unit drafted another report on the permeation of criminal elements in state administration, entitling it the “Worm.” Media notified that The Cure was coming back. A new European decree canceled the postal monopoly in letter delivery. “It is understandable that it bothers people, because changes in set rituals give rise to emotional reactions – how each of us adjusts to and copes with changes depends on our personalities,” commented Ivan David, director of the Bohnice psychiatric asylum and former health minister in Zeman’s cabinet, on reports from Billa grocery chain employees that a considerable number of customers are agitated and perturbed by the company’s new policy of not giving away plastic bags at the register. The Czech Republic joined International Animal Day celebrations. Alice Nellis,David Černý, and David Koller opened their Meet Factory, a new contemporary arts center in a former Czech Railways building in Prague’s Smíchov district. Former Czech premier Stanislav Gross told the media that Slovak bankers had lent him the money to buy his three-hundred-million-crown share package in Moravia Energo. Lucie Talmanová, the new girlfriend of premier and Civic Democratic party chairman Mirek Topolánek, refused to let MF Dnes reporters see her new Volvo’s title, which shows who owned the vehicle before making its way into her hands for 400 thousand crowns; according to all available indications, businessmen and lobbyists from the J&T group are behind Talmanová’s all-terrain Volvo, which is naturally being used by the premier himself, who declares in his public assets statement that he owns no car; when that fact was published by MF Dnes, Topolánek publicly threatened to introduce a new law restricting freedom of speech.

“It went pretty easily,” Pavla Topolánková, the premier’s abandoned wife, wrote in a text message to the Czech press, describing her climb to the peak of Kilimanjaro. Entrepreneur Sebastian Pawlowski announced to the media that Ringier Publishing’s Blesk tabloid is very interested in buying his entertainment daily, Aha!. The Financial Times stopped demanding money to access its web site. After a year of investigation, Military Historical Institute experts identified two anonymous graves in Prague’s Ďáblice Cemetery, where the Nazis buried the remains to Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, two of the heroes who carried out the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The dollar dropped to 19 crowns. No injuries occurred when a KBA Tour bus carrying children on a natural science excursion managed to avoid injuries when two of its back wheels fell off near Netolice. “I wasn’t adequately rewarded for my work,” explained David Borkovec, a Prague city hall clerk who stole some 34 million crowns from the city’s coffers over the last nine years and managed to spend it all without a trace.