Last week 12/09

The ski season ended and larks returned. The first stork landed in Tachov. According to the latest statistics, the Czech Republic officially fell into recession. Brno city hall set up on its premises an advisory clinic and a room for Brno residents in crisis. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer visited Prague on the 10th anniversary of the country's accession to NATO. Fifty years passed since the Tibetan uprising against China's Communist dictatorship was brutally quashed and His Holiness the Dalai Lama called life in occupied Tibet „hell on Earth.“ „We're heading towards mass extinction of marine ecosystems, at a speed unprecedented since the dinosaurs,“ said biologist Carol Turley of Plymouth Marine Laboratory, speaking at a scientific conference in Copenhagen; the biggest news from the conference was the scientists' collective warning that global warming and its consequences are generally much worse than believed so far, and that many island nations are threatened with disappearing even faster than their populations had feared. The transnational café chain Gloria Jean's Coffees announced plans to open up shop in the Czech Republic. ČEZ bought an electricity distribution company in Albania. Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek managed to get Brussels to agree to a Europe-wide reduction in VAT on bike repairs, window cleaning, care services, haircuts and restaurant management. Two parliamentary deputies and one former education minister, all women, were excluded from the Green Party (SZ) for „acting in violation of the statutes.“ „We have never met with such frequent violations of the law at any event,“ said the president of the supreme audit office, František Dohnal, after his commissioners had reviewed the recent account statement of the Nordic World Ski Championships in Liberec. The transport minister ordered workers to stop the widespread felling of trees alongside roads. The Czech currency bounced back and strengthened from 30 crowns to the euro to 26 crowns to the euro. High court Judge Naděžda Žáková reversed a ruling by Judge Vojtěch Cepl, who had recently ruled that the thwarted investigation into former Deputy Prime Minister Jiří Čunek's corruption case had been arranged by the „judicial mafia,“ meaning that people in power had conspired with influential clerks from the domestic justice system; in addition to cancelling the verdict, Žáková also ruled that Judge Cepl must never handle the „judicial mafia“ case again, which stirred concern and protests from experts and in the lay press. „What kind of language is that? What are they teaching you at home?“ a middle-aged man shouted at a six-year-old boy who, according to eyewitnesses, had said to his friend on a Brno playground, „I'm bored, it's crap“; the man then knocked the boy to the ground and kicked him in the head so hard that the child ended in the hospital; „From the information we gathered on the scene, we found that it wasn't a crime but an offense, and so we didn't investigate further or attempt to track down the attacker,“ said police spokeswoman Andrea Procházková, explaining to citizens why her organization had not found the perpetrator. In protest against low milk prices, 5,000 angry farmers marched through Prague, shouting: „Will the government force us to kill our herds?“

„On the issue of climate change, that man is totally confused and he gathers around him quite a lot of muddle-headed people. These climate-change deniers are just like those who argued that the Earth is flat, that there is no relationship between smoking and cancer or between HIV and AIDS,“ prominent British economist Nicholas Stern told The Guardian, commenting on Czech President Václav Klaus's speech at the New York conference Global Warming: Was It Ever a Crisis? According to a voter popularity poll, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) beat the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD). News agencies reported that the trial of Bernard Madoff, the famous financier who robbed his clients of a record 65 billion US dollars, began in New York. Scientists studying a group of volunteers revealed that people who eat less are healthier in old age and have a better life. „Everything will be OK again, we have the best economic machine that has ever been created,“ said the hopeful voice of the world's richest man and most famous investor, Warren Buffett, reassuring an alarmed global public. Czech Minister for Human Rights and Minorities Michael Kocáb announced plans to launch a campaign against slapping children this spring. Becherovka moved from Karlovy Vary to Bohatice. Meteorologists reported the sun would return, following rainy days, but not until the end of the month.