Last week 45/2005

The living celebrated All Souls’ Day at Czech cemeteries. The Finance Ministry raised its projected growth rate of the domestic economy from 4 to 4.8 percent. Half of Prima TV was taken over by the Swedish Modern Times Group. After years of refusal and litigation, hospitals began releasing as-yet secret information on how successfully and how well they cure their patients. Mia Farrow shot scenes in Lednice. With a complete lack of interest from his colleagues, Chamber of Deputies Chairman Lubomír Zaorálek submitted for discussion his Ethics Code for Deputies, which would seek to deter members of the Lower Chamber from, e.g., employing relatives or getting involved with lobbyists and the like.

“We’re prepared to hold a debate on the ethical aspects of deputies’ behavior, but it has to be presented by a credible individual,” ODS Vice Chairman Petr Nečas said of Zaorálek’s initiative, while concurrently criticizing the head the chamber for illegally employing his assistant, being mixed up in peculiar privatization cases, and flying home to Ostrava after work in a specially outfitted army helicopter. Vinetou, the red gentleman, visited Czechia. Newspapers reported in their “news in brief” sections that bird flu had made its way to North America. The Foreign Ministry delivered a sharp protest note to the Cuban Ambassador to Prague objecting to dictator Fidel Castro’s decision to prohibit Czech diplomats in Cuba from publicly celebrating the Czech national holiday on October 28th because guests at the celebration were to include members of Women in White, i.e., an association of wives and girlfriends of the Castro Regime’s political prisoners; in the end, the holiday was celebrated in the Havana residence of Czech chargé d’affaires Petr Siegler. The army command announced it would soon build ten new retirement homes across the Czech Republic for war heroes and veterans. “On the turn just before the home stretch, his foot landed wrong and he broke his leg. We had to put him down,” trainer Čestmír Olehla told reporters, describing how the big favorite for the President of the Republic’s Prize from this year’s derby – the stallion Tankred a.k.a. Tanýsek – met his fate at Chuchle Racetrack. Škoda Auto manufactured its five-millionth vehicle. A parliamentary coalition of socialists and communists managed to push through the end of restitution in the Czech Republic. According to the latest STEM poll, 40 % of Czechs have the impression that the European Union meddles in their lives more than is necessary; most Czechs also believe the Czech government and parliament have the same inappropriate influence over their lives. A drunken Slovak hunter seriously injured his Moravian friend with two shots to the chest while on a hunt near Strání. The hunting season began. Three juveniles who broke into a Romany family’s apartment in Jeseník while drunk, seriously injured a pregnant Romany woman with a cobblestone, and used a broken shard of glass to cut her husband all over his body one night two years ago, were sentenced to three and four years in prison. Last year, a Jeseník court had called their actions “schoolboy pranks” and let them walk free; the perpetrators immediately appealed the latest ruling. David Koller quit his band Lucie. “I have nothing to say for now, I’ll comment once the situation calms down,” said Tachov Foreign Police chief Marta Fuchsová, when asked by reporters about the origin of the more than 250,000 crowns that were stored around her office in envelopes, which was, according to her criminal complaint, stolen by one of her colleagues on the Tachov police force. After spending three weeks helping earthquake victims in Pakastin’s Ravalkot, a team of rescue workers returned to Liberec. Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek announced that his government would buy and then raze a pig farm in Lety u Písek, which now stands on the site where Czechs built a concentration camp for their Romany fellow-citizens before the war and then stood guard over them there under the Nazi occupation before they were sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz; Paroubek’s government now wants to build a memorial to Romany victims of the Holocaust. “I don’t deny that we’re trying to create a certain counter-balance to human reality shows, and I believe we’ll thereby even learn something about ourselves,” Prague Zoo Director Petr Fejk said of his institution’s decision to collaborate with public television by letting it place its cameras in the cages of Prague’s gorillas and film their “natural behavior” for the next three months to entertain viewers on a show called Disclosure.