Last week 07/09

Hurricane-force winds and snow hit the Vysočina region. The prices of summer package holidays went up. Tesco announced it would open 30 new stores in the Czech Republic this year. Police investigators discovered that the detached body parts recently found in the woods near Všerub na Domažlicku belong to a German cook from Munich. The crown experienced a record weakening against the dollar and the euro; analysts warned the public that one euro would cost 32 crowns in no time. „It's a crisis. This is the end of the hard Czech currency,“ exclaimed a front-page headline in Hospodářské noviny. The price of new Škoda cars dropped by 80,000 crowns. The Czech president's office announced that Václav Klaus had accepted an invitation from Rupert Murdoch to visit the USA. A 120-year-old sewer pipe in Brno's Masaryk neighborhood fell apart. Schoolchildren had their semester break. Judge Petr Braun denied an appeal from former state prosecutor Ludmila Brožová, 87, to defer the start of her six-year prison sentence for the judicial murder of opposition politician Milada Horáková during the era of Communist terror in the early 1950s. „People have been lining up since early morning. For instance, we gave drugs to a woman who had come all the way from Frýdlant with 10 prescriptions,“ said the spokesperson for the regional hospital in Liberec, describing just what Czechs are willing to undergo in order to avoid paying the 30-crown surcharge on each prescription; in some regional hospitals, where the new Social Democrat-controlled regional governments canceled the surcharges as a „gift,“ hospitals had to deploy security guards to manage the surge of citizens. Economists criticized the regions' surcharge refunds as a risky and stupid act, saying that the consequences of the extravagance would become apparent in the future. „In a few years' time, when people marvel that a bridge or school wasn't built, they can be sure it was because they didn't have to pay 30 crowns to visit a doctor,“ pronounced Tomáš Sedláček of the government's national economic council. The era of DVD rental stores came to an end. Reporters Without Borders and the European Newspaper Publishers Association both came out sharply against the Czech penal code amendment that bans journalists from publishing the contents of police telephone taps. Apartment prices dropped. Iran announced that it has a long-range missile capable of reaching Central Europe, but the Green Party's foreign policy section has not issued any reassuring communiqués on the matter. The Buddha-Bar chain's first hotel opened in Prague. Czech military servicemen and servicewomen returned to Prague after a seven-month mission in the Dutch Camp Hadrian base in Afghanistan.

„I suppose the criticism is ideologically based on the feminist idea that women are the same as men, that they don't have uteruses and that their procreative function is not so important for mankind,“ said Czech MEP and sexologist Jaroslav Zvěřina (Civic Democratic Party - ODS) in reaction to the European Parliament's official protest at Czech efforts to torpedo the EU's pronounced goal of ensuring that every member state have enough nursery schools and pre-schools to enable every woman the freedom to decide whether she wants to put her child in daycare or whether she's going to stay home instead of pursuing a career; the Czech Social Affairs Ministry disapproves of this freedom of choice for women and would rather administratively limit the number of daycare facilities. The Social Democrats came up with a plan to give everyone who owns an old car 25,000 crowns for a new one. „We're considering it too,“ remarked Industry and Trade Minister Martin Říman (ODS). The crisis increased the national debt. Austria's Waldviertel Akademie organized a round-table discussion on the theme, „Revolution in Europe - 1989“ in the granary of the Primmersdorf chateau. Věra Chytilová celebrated her 80th birthday. Austria decided not to open its labor market to citizens of new EU member countries. An expert witness discovered that a tire that blew out two years ago on a road near Rokycany and sent a truck careening into the other lane, where it crashed head-on with a Peugeot killing two women and a child, was actually a spare tire that technicians had removed because it was completely destroyed but which was remounted on the truck by the driver in order to save money. Pavel Brázda's exhibition Ukázka z Lidské komedie („An Example From the Human Comedy“) opened at Galerie 5. Patro.