Last week 47/09

Twenty years passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Temperatures climbed to 12 degrees Celsius. A new, three-meter-high landmark separated the territory of Bohemia from Moravia on the banks of the Pilská reservoir in Žďár nad Sázavou. Unemployment dropped for the first time in a year. Svatomartinské (St. Martin's) wine was blessed on Masarykovo náměstí in Uherské Hradiště. Theatre director and actor Otomar Krejča died at the age of 87. In Plzeň, Dagmar Tauchenová, 28, hijacked a prison escort transporting her 42-year-old husband, convicted safecracker Pavel Tauchen, to hospital for a medical exam and, wielding a gun, demanded his guards release him; the two then escaped, but when a police squad surrounded them in Hajany, near Strakonice, a few hours later, a firefight broke out in which the fleeing man died and his wife was seriously injured. Tom Jones and Jerry Lee Lewis played in Prague.
"The countries of Central and Eastern Europe will reach the Western standard within 25 years," Erste Bank CEO Andreas Treichl told the business newspaper Hospodářské noviny. An inspection found that a Tesco store in Plzeň had extended the shelf life of dead chickens it was selling from November 10 to November 14 simply by sticking new labels over the originals. Former ČEZ Bulgaria CEO Luboš Pavlas was named the CEO of Czech Coal. KomiksFEST ended in Prague. The European Commission warned the Czech Republic that it would cease to receive EU subsidies unless it managed to reduce its budget deficit to below three percent of GDP by 2013; "Brussels Puts a Knife to Prague's Neck," the newspaper Lidové noviny commented on the commission's demand to reduce the debt, and the Finance Ministry called it "difficult to fulfill."
"The complexes have been built and the cost of the whole event would probably be less," said Senate chairman Přemysl Sobotka (Civic Democratic Party; ODS) in support of his party colleague, Liberec Mayor Jiří Kittner, who wants his city to place a bid to host the World Ski Championship again; the last such event ended nearly 80 million crowns in the red, despite the state's quarter-of-a-billion-crown subsidy.
"We'd be better off repairing the sidewalks and investing in kindergartens and new parks than holding another megalomaniacal and senseless event," said Jiří Korytář, a spokesperson for the opposition in Liberec, commenting on Kittner's idea. Statistics revealed that a third of domestic households don't get by on their incomes alone, and that Czechs insure their property more than their lives. A new European regulation banned chemical preservatives and additives in food in the EU. Chomutov Mayor Ivana Řápková filed a lawsuit seeking an apology and damages of one million crowns from the University of West Bohemia (Západočeská univerzita) in Plzeň after it emerged that she holds a law degree from the school, even though none of the teachers recall giving her exams, or credits, or even having seen her; Řápková says that all the requisites in her transcripts (which she can't find) were given to her by just one professor, who died a year ago.
"What is so strange about it? Those were the rules in Plzeň," said Petr Martínek, chief of police in the Ustí nad Labem region, responding to Hospodářské noviny's surprise that, some years ago, the law school in Plzeň recognized a 20-year-old exam from Martínek's economics studies in the Soviet Union, allowing the detective to complete a five-year law program in half the time. Mladá fronta Dnes warned its readers that Maclaren strollers, a UK brand, can amputate the fingers of child passengers, as has happened in 12 cases. The Chamber of Deputies (Poslanecká sněmovna) passed a law allowing regional referendums. Lukáš Sedláček was dismissed from the Czech Army for holding clandestine terrorist training sessions for members of the neo-Nazi organization White Justice; two other soldiers on a mission in Afghanistan were thrown out of the army for wearing SS symbols on their helmets. German President Horst Köhler bestowed the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) upon Professor Tomáš Kost for his contribution to Czech-German reconciliation. Stefan Füle was appointed as the Czech Republic's next European commissioner.
"A wordsmith might write that we'll grasp what is at stake only when we are forced to prohibit dumplings because Brussels (or the German-French condominium) decides they are unhealthy, as they make people fat," said Petr Hájek, President Václav Klaus's advisor and spokesperson, explaining the importance of the Czech Republic's loss of sovereignty to the European Union in Lidové noviny. Meteorologists announced that snow would not fall until St. Nicholas's Day (December 6).