Last week 46/2005

An unidentified lucky person won 103 million crowns awaiting a winner in Sunday’s Sportka jackpot. A delegation of Czech bishops left to visit Pope Benedict XVI. Bob Dylan played in Prague. Members of the National Security Council decided that, in light of the threat of a bird flu pandemic, the Czech Republic would refill its depleted supplies of medicine for the illness and would buy the drug Relenza in Great Britain.

Forty cars piled up in the fog on the highway near Mladá Boleslav. “It’s total rubbish,” said state prosecutor Jaroslav Dolejší, commenting on the media first reports and suggestions that it was he who let already arrested entrepreneur Radovan Krejcíř leave a police-barricaded villa last summer in exchange for receiving bills of exchange proving the businessman had lent leading Social Democrats (CSSD) a total of sixty million crowns; however, Krejcíř did not give him the bills of exchange and instead fled with them to the Seychelles. General Jan Babinec (88), a hero of the fight for freedom, died. Jiří Suchý and Michal Ajvay won this year’s Jaroslav Seifert Prize for Literature. Interior Minister František Bublan assured the public that there is no danger in the Czech Republic of race riots and unrest like those that have been shaking France for the past two weeks. Education Minister Petr Buzková made a proposal to the cabinet for English to be taught in Czech nursery schools. Two murderers escaped from prison in Pilsen. In Zaječ u Břeclavi, a toilet paper manufacturing plant caught on fire. “The order said to rid the hall of birds, but we didn’t manage to catch them in a net, so we, under pressure from a pending deadline, had to implement an extreme measure,” Pilsen Animal Rescue Station director Karel Makoň told police officers who had come to arrest him for walking through the local Tesco department store and, during business hours, shooting songbirds flying near the ceiling. Authorities began prosecuting more employees and managers of the grocery chain Julius Meinl, whose deli counters offered customers rotten meat labeled with falsified tags. News agencies reported that another of Saddam Hussein’s attorneys was killed by unidentified assailants. Police arrested a nineteen-year-old man from Malé Čičovice u Prahy, a model soon-to-be husband and father, chess player, and music composer, who admitted he had – without any motive –murdered and hacked to pieces with an axe a female classmate who had been missing since mid-October. Energy giant ČEZ announced a record profit of 17 billion crowns and a 10-percent price hike for electrical power. Karel Roden got the lead in a commercial for Fernet Stock. Unemployment dropped from 8.8 to 8.5 percent. Agriculture Minister and Land Fund Director Petr Zgarba had to step down after it surfaced that his friends bought land valued at millions for practically nothing from the Land Fund. “You have to go after him hard, kick him around,” boxer Jaroslav Plašil told reporters before his match with Norwegian boxer Carewe. Physicists from Palacky University in Olomouc invented a way of coding secret information with the help of light. President Václav Klaus and his wife Livia visited India. One hundred and fifty volunteers left for the Beskyd Mountains in order to – for the seventh year running – prevent hunters from shooting the last two or three protected wolves living near the Czech-Slovak border by taking walks and keeping watch over the forests all winter long. Komerční banka raised its mortgage rates. Richard Hindls was appointed Rector of the Economic University in Prague. Media informed that the entire month after the catastrophic earthquake in Pakistan’s Kashmiri region, which killed 80,000 people and injured or destroyed the homes of three million more, just a fraction of the needed help arrived. “We don’t have enough shelter for all the people left homeless, and, to put it bluntly, those who don’t get it will freeze to death,” said World Health Organization spokesperson Sacha Bootsman, commenting on the fact that winter is approaching in the afflicted regions, where meteorologists predict up to five meters of snow and temperatures of around -25°C; the Czech humanitarian organization People in Need then reminded the public of its account for Pakistan 588588588/0300. The European spacecraft Venus Express blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a long mission to discover how Venus looks and whether life is at all possible there.