Last week 47/2007

Winter arrived and meteorologists announced it would stay. Norman Mailer died. Eighteen applicants applied for the position of director of state forests. World champion javelin thrower Barbora Špotáková was named Czech Athlete of the Year 2007. The European Human Rights Court ordered the Czech Republic to pay compensation to the Roma children whom it has been groundlessly sending to special schools for years and thereby mercilessly ruining their lives. „The said deed is not a criminal act,“ declared the state prosecutor's office, explaining why it had suspended the ten-year-old criminal prosecution of financier Pavel Tykač, accused of stealing one billion crowns belonging to CS Fund shareholders. Parliament started debating a bill that would radically toughen penalties for corruption. Dog sleds raced in Votice. Cyril Svoboda of the Christian Democratic Party filled the post of regional development minister left unoccupied after the resignation of his fellow party member Jiří Čunek. Austrian tobacconists announced a strike for late November aimed at forcing their government – against European regulations and with the risk of lawsuits from the European Commission – to extend the import ban on Czech cigarettes, which are cheaper and will, according to the Austrian guild's representatives, „ruin tobacconists' trade in Austria within a month,“ into the New Year. „He's our Havel – in him, we have the chance for Cuba to one day see a velvet revolution like Czechoslovakia did,“ declared Lincoln Diaz-Balart, U.S. congressman of Cuban descent, after President George Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Oscar Elias Biscet, a Cuban physician who was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Cuban regime in 2003 for publicly criticizing his country's health care conditions. „I have seen here disgraces so perverse and barbaric that they can not even be written about. But nothing will deter me, I will continue my fight,“ the Czech press cited from a message that the seriously ill and malnourished Biscet recently managed to smuggle out of the prison to his wife. The ski season began. The Austrian cabinet announced that, contrary to the Czech Republic's admittance to the Schengen border-free zone, it is truly determined to continue guarding the Czech-Austrian border and thereby protect the Austrian public from a possible surge of refugees and criminals. Statistics showed that Czechs have surpassed Germans – in food prices. Jaroslav Palas, the former Social Democratic agriculture minister who gave away the strategic chemical plant Setuza to the gangsters associated with recently assassinated mafia boss František Mrázek, was voted to head the Moravia-Silesia candidate list for the regional elections by his party's nomination conference in Ostrava.

„I am a persecuted artist. In my town of San José, Costa Rica, there are dozens of stray dogs starving to death and dying on the streets and nobody bats an eye – but when you exhibit one of them, it triggers a response that shows the incredible hypocrisy in us,“ Mladá fronta DNES cited the statement with which Costa Rican artist Guilermo Habakuk Vargas, 50, responded to a global wave of outrage and protest against his latest work, for which he caught a stray dog and exhibited it –tethered to a chain in a gallery and left without any food until the animal died – as a „dying artifact.“ Young wine was tasted on St. Martin's day. Closer examination showed that galaxy I Zwicky 18 is not one of the cosmos' youngest clusters, as was previously thought, but that it contains stars even older than 10 billion years. In an attempt to lure residents from their cars and into public transport vehicles, Prague city hall decided to mark up the fare for bus and tram rides from 20 to 26 crowns. The number of counterfeit car parts on the market increased. Media reported about a meeting of 19 U.S. military pilots and politicians who called on the White House and the governments of other countries to, „after forty years of closed eyes, start to carefully investigate the unidentified flying objects in their skies and dispel the myth that all UFO sightings can be rationally explained.“ „So many people drive fast, and I take the heat because I'm Baroš,“ pronounced Milan Baroš, Czech reserve player for Lyon football club, after the French police revoked his driving license and seized his Ferrari when they clocked him driving 271 kilometers per hour. Falling snow took Czech drivers by surprise again.