Last week 44/2007

Daylight saving time ended. The Czech Republic commemorated Pavel Tigrid on what would have been his 90th birthday. The first skiers appeared below Praděd peak. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Czech Republic and declared that even if the American radar base is built in the Brdy Hills, it would only start operating after Iran builds and tests a long-range missile that could threaten the West. Steel production was ceremoniously re-launched at Poldi Kladno after a long closure. The governments of EU member countries agreed on the new European constitution in Lisbon. The budget made it to the second round in the Chamber of Deputies. The Czech Agrarian Chamber rallied behind pig farmers who have expressed discontent with declining meat prices and called on the government to compensate their losses from public funds. “For a kilogram of pork we get 28 crowns, while the cost of feed is 35 crowns, so when our co-op produces 1000 pigs a week, we’re losing roughly 3 million a month,”Josef Luka, the director of a pig-farming cooperative in Mladá Boleslav, described the problem to reporters. At the Invex new technology trade fair in Brno, the world’s fastest and smartest personal computer, the Comfort, was introduced. The World Bank re-categorized the Czech Republic as a wealthy country and decided that it can no longer receive loans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The hunting season began. At a boar hunt in the woods near Strod, hunters shot and wounded a fifteen-year-old boy whose task was to drive the boars out. Like every year at this time, voluntary wolf protection patrols set off to the Beskyd Mountains to prevent poachers from shooting the few local live wolves here. “Could you tell Deputy Chytek from the Civic Democrats to go to the microphone and say what he just yelled at me from the bench – to go to hell,” Social Democratic Deputy David Rath asked presiding chamber chairman Jan Kasal during a session in which he brought the emotions to the brink by calling dissenting Civic Democratic delegates “cold-blooded beasts” during a debate over the state’s obligation to pay alimony on behalf of those who don’t pay. Chemist Antonín Holý was named this year’s “Czech Head.” Experts from Personal Fabric, an employment agency, announced that the Czech labor market had run out of Ukrainians. Due to procedural errors, the court overruled a Prague City Hall decision prohibiting local neo-Nazis from organizing a night-time march through Prague’s Jewish Quarter on November 10th – the anniversary of the Nazi pogrom known as the “Crystal Night”; following the court ruling, via its web site the Jewish Liberal Union called on all of its “young, healthy athletes and soldiers” to come to Prague that day and join the active resistance against the neo-Nazi provocation.

“Compared to other developed countries, the situation is bad here – people here don’t have a need to continue learning and they often feel that the information they learned as pupils in school suffices for the rest of their lives,” remarked Miroslava Mandíková, who represents the National Education Fund, commenting on the fact that unlike the Danish, Swedish or American populaces where 35 percent continue their educations after high school, less that 11 percent of the Czech populace between the ages of 25 and 64 seek higher education. The price of baked goods went up. After a meeting with dissidents in Santa Clara, two activists from the People in Need charity organization were detained by the Cuban political police and deported from Cuba. The Czech currency strengthened to another record – 27.12 crowns to one euro. Two former border guards, Lubomír Kratochvíl and Zdeněk Palásek, were given a three-year conditional sentence for shooting emigrant Jaroslav Masařík on the Czech-Austrian border 35 years ago and then dragging the wounded man back to communist Czechoslovakia. The swimming season at the Dalešice Reservoir closed. Jan Kubice, the director of the Organized Crime Fighting Unit, and all the important detectives from his team announced their departure from the Czech Police. “Czech Television censors,” pronounced former premier Miloš Zeman after Czech Television dramaturgists had cut a segment from a film about his career without the director’s knowledge in which Zeman’s former advisor Miroslav Šlouf tells the filmmakers about his former boss: “I don’t think his returning to the political domain like Churchill is ruled out.” Scientists discovered that frequent and longtime mobile phone use contributes to the development of brain cancer. The price of advertising on TV Nova rose.