Last week 46/2007

Candles were lit in Czech cemeteries for the souls of the deceased. The ongoing mortgage crisis in the U.S.A. caused bank shares to drop in record numbers on the Czech stock exchange. A planned march by local neo-Nazis trying to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the Crystal Night, the biggest pogrom against Jews in Hitler-era Germany, did not end up passing through Prague’s Jewish Quarter. Czech communists commemorated Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in Prague’s Olšany Cemetery. For the first time since its discovery eighty-two years ago, Egyptian authorities allowed the world to see the mummy of Pharoah Tutankhamen. “As soon as someone buys you, it’s the end; foreigners are only interested in money,”Eva Štěpanková, 62, founder and owner of the local cosmetics empire Ryor, told Hospodářské noviny; representatives of a U.S. competitor, Elisabeth Arden, recently expressed interest in acquiring Ryor – without success. The hunting seasoned ended with a symbolic fox hunt. One-hundred thousand crowns seized during a raid on drug dealers in Pilsen disappeared from the Pilsen state prosecutors’ office’s bank account. Reporters for Mladá fronta DNES discovered from leaked police wiretapping files that František Mrázek, the murdered “Czech underworld boss,” had very close relations with Miroslav Šlouf, Miloš Zeman’s chief advisor, from 1998 to 2002. “I liked him in a way – it bothered me that they killed him,” replied Šlouf when the daily’s reporters asked what kind of relationship they had had; Šlouf also admitted to the newspaper that he had met with Mrázek “about matters concerning Czech industry,” about bank privatization, and about filling the highest positions in police organizations. Skyrocketing oil prices quaked markets. The Czech army decided to donate 12 surplus helicopters to Afghanistan and thereby strengthen the country’s newly formed national armed forces. Paco de Lucia played in Prague. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, U.S. unmanned interplanetary spacecraft that have been probing the outer edge of our solar system for 30 years, were commemorated at the North Bohemian Science Library in Ústí nad Labem.

“It has this terribly dull effect on me, as if I were stuck in a container – every time I want to stretch out, I hit something; maybe it’s also because I know it too well and nothing provokes or motivates me here. I fall straight into a stereotype, which kills me, whereas in Paris or London I don’t have time for that,” replied London-dwelling artist Hynek Martinec, 26, who won the prestigious British BP Portrait Award for his painting “Zuzana in Paris Studio,” when asked by Respekt, “Why don’t you live in the Czech Republic? Prague didn’t suffice?” The Social Democrats and Greens agreed that their joint candidate for the upcoming presidential elections against Václav Klaus would be the Czech-American economist Jan Švejnar. A Polish scuba-diver died in a flooded quarry near Svobodné Heřmanice. Czech businessmen and industrialists drafted a petition regarding strategic requisites for the Czech economy in which they also appealed to Topolánek’s government to finally set a firm date for adopting the euro and for that date to be sooner rather than later. “The ingratitude hurts more than the blows,” complained Miloš Mašek, deputy mayor of Třebíč, after a scuffle in his office with an angry resident trying to persuade the city to help desperate residents of new city-owned apartments that were built with inadequate noise-proofing; the attacker explained that his actions were in self-defense against Mašek’s aggressive behavior, which the police did not rule out in light of the deputy mayor’s recent physical attack on inquiring Czech Television reporters. Fees at cadastral offices increased. Analysts concluded that Czech households would cut their currently high level of consumption and begin to save. The Hradec Králové court handling the case against former Bambini di Praga conductor Bohumil Kulínský, who is charged with sexually abusing at least 49 underage female choir members during his career, continued interviewing throngs of witnesses in the case. The Vysočiny Museum announced that one of its most valuable exponents is literally falling to pieces – the oldest cake in Central Europe, a 130-year-old three-tiered sponge cake – and nobody can save it. After the Indian summer, snow and high winds came. With the body completed veiled, Skoda tested its new model, the Superb, for endurance in Death Valley, California.