Last week 06/09

Autor fotografie: Pavel Reisenauer

Former President Václav Havel's health improved to extent that that consulting physicians at Motol hospital released him for out-patient care. A flu epidemic arrived in the Czech Republic. PC component prices rose. The government's economic council presented its stopgap plan for the financial crisis: support exports, cut taxes and improve transportation systems in remote regions. The iPhone for the poor - the Google Phone - arrived on the market. A "Highland Kingdom" was declared in the municipality of Loukovice in the Třebič Region. "It's an expensive, absurd and immoral proposal - state aid should lead to keeping jobs, not to limiting private companies' responsibility to their employees," said Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek, commenting on the Czech Association of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Crafts' (Asociace malých a středních podniků a živnostníků České republiky's) appeal to the government to move quickly to set up a business-support fund that would dole out severance pay to redundant and laid-off employees. Historian Emanuel Mandler died. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek attended a meeting of European politicians in Budapest to look into the possibility of building the Nabucco pipeline, which would transport natural gas to Europe from regions other than the inscrutable and formidable Russia. A memorial service for Jan Kaplický was held in Prague. After eight years of bans and litigation, Litoměřice's building authority granted local resident Petr Žáček a permit to build a house out of hemp. CE Wood, the country's biggest wood processing holding, announced it would lay off all 2,000 of its employees. Karlovarský porcelán, the largest Czech utility porcelain producer, also decided to lay off its entire staff. Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated well-known Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, who was excommunicated from the church in 1988. "This rehabilitation could open up deep wounds; Williamson is a despicable liar whose sole goal is to revive centuries-old hatred of Jews," CRIF, the representative council of French Jewish institutions, said of the Pope's decision. Czech President Václav Klaus sent a message of greeting to Warsaw to the recently founded nationalist Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-European party Naprzód Polsko! (Forward, Poland!). Statisticians announced that the travel agency boom was over because people have cut back on traveling. The constitutional court ruled that tax authorities must stop their current practice of conducting random audits on groundlessly selected individuals, and the Finance Ministry voiced strong objection to the ruling. The government approved the "White Book" (Bílá kniha) proposals to reform tertiary education. Jaromír Jágr returned to the national ice hockey team.

The environmental inspectorate rejected a request filed by traffic police to fell all trees lining Czech roads, and the inspectors proposed instead that crash barriers be built along all the country's roads. Georges Braque's Fruits, cruche et pipe ("Fruit, Pitcher and Pipe") sold for 9.8 million crowns at an auction in Prague. A STEM agency poll revealed that three-quarters of all Czechs feel European and have a sense of solidarity with events on the European continent. The media cited the influential London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual report, which concluded that NATO members' futures will depend on their ability to complete their peace mission in Afghanistan and to resolve the Russian-Georgian conflict. The Czech Republic offered the bankrupt Latvia a 5.5-billion-crown loan. A random inspection detected four drunken employees among the team operating the Dukovany nuclear power plant. The unknown parents of a three-month-old baby girl left her in Ostrava's baby box. Parliamentary deputy Tomáš Kvapil of the Christian and Democratic Union - Czechoslovak People's Party (KDU-ČSL) suffered a cerebral aneurism and Olomouc hospital physicians placed him in an artificial coma. Česká pošta, the Czech postal service, made a deal with the Interior Ministry to keep village post offices running. Seventy mothers in Prague had a group photo taken during a public breast-feeding session to protest Facebook's decision to delete pictures of women breast-feeding their children from the social networking site. "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion," said Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, whose staff warned the world about the tiny hydrozoan Turritopsis nutricula, which is spreading uncontrollably to all the world's oceans and is capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage, and, according to scientists, is the only known life-form on Earth that can live forever. Director and screenwriter Marie Poledňáková presented her new family comedy, Líbáš jako Bůh ("You Kiss Like a God"), to reporters.