Last week 11/09

Snow melted and rivers swelled. Asteroid 2009DD45 missed the Earth by some 63,000 kilometers. Karel Brückner was dismissed as the Austrian national team coach by the Austrian football association, at his own request. The Karel Gott museum - Gottland - in Jevany was closed down due to a lack of public interest and large financial losses. The government proposed a hike in waste removal fees. The oldest living RAF pilot, Peter Uruba, died at the age of 92. „Good, because I stand by it,“ replied Dutchwoman Maryze Schoneveld van der Linde, 39, who has suffered from the rare Pompe disease for years and is kept alive by drugs that cost nine million crowns annually, when asked by Czech newspapers, „How does it feel to use such expensive medicine?“ Gas companies reported they would lower the cost of natural gas in the spring, but only a little. After Hungary and Latvia, another member of the European Union, Romania, began to collapse economically and has requested international assistance. The heads of EU member states met in Brussels to try to unify their „national“ responses to the current economic crisis, and the head of the summit, Mirek Topolánek, said after the meeting that the EU is facing „the biggest threat to its life in history.“ Stock prices on the Prague Stock Exchange fell to less than half the value of their „pre-crisis“ status and interest in them has approached zero. Škoda announced that Yeti would arrive in the summer. At the personal intervention of Mayor Roman Onderka (Social Democratic Party; ČSSD) and despite the culture commission's recommendations to the contrary, the city of Brno rejected a 50,000-crown grant for the Mezipatra gay and lesbian film festival. Jan Vladislav died. „It was mischief-making that could not trample the appellant's dignity, and that's how the public perceived it too,“ the Prague high court announced, explaining its decision to deny, after eight years of litigation, a Czech Roma's petition to have the management of a Šumava restaurant apologize for displaying a baseball bat with the words „For Gypsies“ above the bar in 2001 - just after four skinheads had broken into a Roma family's apartment in Slovakia and beat a sleeping mother to death.

„Švanda stole a bottle of Fernet at Kaufland and the guy went to drink with us, but Švanda got annoyed that he was drinking a lot, and so he stabbed him in the throat, and then I stabbed him twice. He fell to the ground and pleaded for us to leave him be, but Švanda stabbed him a few more times and then we went to the pub and he remained lying there,“ said Jihlava resident Josef Červeňák, 41, testifying before a Brno court how he and an accomplice had stabbed to death an unknown man in the bushes in Jihlava last summer. The Chamber of Deputies (Poslanecká sněmovna) approved a government proposal for changes in science funding. Newspapers reported that US President Barack Obama had proposed to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would end its plan to build a radar base in the Czech Republic if Russia would help force Iran to abandon plans to manufacture nuclear bombs. „The strongest feeling was terrible heaviness and at the same time inappropriateness: what are we actually doing there, rubbernecking as if we were on a field trip; many of us also really enjoyed it - especially the feeling that we were in that regime for a week and that at home we'd left it behind us,“ documentary maker Linda Jablonská told Lidové noviny about her experience of going to North Korea on a package tour to shoot her film Vítejte v KLDR! („Welcome to the DPRK!“). Doctors warned the public that for three-quarters of the population winter's exodus would inevitably be linked to spring fatigue - lack of energy, fluctuations in moods and sometimes even depression. The Czech Supreme Court upheld a previous lower court judgment that St. Vitus's cathedral does not belong to the Church but to the state. Czech Medical Chamber (Česká lékařská komora) President Milan Kubek accused women of working less, because of children, and that „the amount of work performed by women working in medicine cannot be compared to that of men.“ „It's a sort of symbol of the futility of expecting anything,“ answered the leader of the Třebíč band FruFru, Václav Bartoš, to the question from the newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes, „Why is your record called ‚When Penguins Fly‘? Is there some subtext?“ The online TV station Stream.cz began broadcasting a new version of the German course series Alles Gute.