Last week 13/09

Reconstruction of the half-century-old chimpanzee cages began at Brno's zoo. Temperatures dropped and it snowed. Authorities launched a new campaign, Celé Česko čte dětem („The Whole Czech Republic Reads to Children“), which aims to get parents to read fairytales to their offspring more often. The government warned the general public that worse economic times await us. Česká národní banka (Czech National Bank) figures showed that Czechs have begun to save money. „Although the aggrieved party acted naively, according to experts that is due to him having a lower level of suspicion,“ concluded a regional court judge in Plzeň on the case of a defrauder, who, over a two-year period, elicited 25 million crowns from the owner of a local plumbing company under various promises of miraculously profitable investments and lost every single heller of that on slot machines; the fraudulent behavior eventually got him 11 years behind bars. Due to a potential shortage of votes, the government withdrew a vote on the US radar base in the Brdy hills from parliament's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies (Poslanecká sněmovna). The Společnost přátel žehu („Friends of Cremation Association“) celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding. The number of weddings in the Czech Republic fell. President Václav Klaus's whole family left the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and Klaus announced that he would attend the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) congress for the first time in his life. The Forman brothers' staging of Obludárium won this year's Alfréd Radok prize (cenu Alfréda Radoka) for best theatrical production. Clouds formed over the low-cost airline SkyEurope. Following the government's decision to help laid-off glassworkers with 30 million crowns in state aid, glassworkers unions called off a planned demonstration in Prague. „I slept with a revolver,“ actress Zlata Adamovská admitted to Lidové noviny. „We have a dead man here who died after being beaten, which occurred in the presence of three police officers, but we do not know which of them attacked, and it is therefore not apparent why Srnský should be taken into custody,“ said Judge Michal Kabelík, explaining why he had denied the state prosecutor's request to have officer Josef Srnský taken into custody; in early January in Brno, Srnský was the captain of a three-member patrol that arrived to arrest Vietnamese laborer Hoang Son Lama, 43, who had been accused by his landlady – wrongly, it later transpired – of harboring drugs in his room; during the arrest, the policemen beat and kicked Mr. Lama so badly that he died in hospital shortly afterward. One sheep gave birth to six lambs in the Hrob garden near Pelhřimov. On Sněžka mountain, the Polish observatory collapsed under the weight of snow. Erstwhile Communist secret police agent and terrorist Pavel Minařík, who planned a bomb attack on Munich's Radio Free Europe in the 1970s, was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for insurance fraud. In order to allow people a „safe setting, undisturbed by children's behavior and their developing personalities,“ the owner of Blended, a Brno café, banned people with small children from his business.

„We're not in the metro, we can't have these cables lying around here, we need space,“ said Zbyněk Novotný (ODS), a member of the permanent commission for the Chamber of Deputies' work, explaining why the body forbade television reporters filming parliamentary deputies in areas outside the chamber auditorium and only allowed the use of cameras in the press center on the floor below. The Defense Ministry signed a 15-billion-crown contract with Austria for 107 Pandur tanks. The media reported that Norwegian scientists in Antarctica had found a fossilized skeleton of the most fearsome creature that ever lived on Earth: the marine reptile, nicknamed Predator X, was 15 meters long and had a bite force of more than two tonnes per square centimeter. Madeleine Albright visited Prague. The Labor Ministry promised to give companies that find themselves in trouble during the crisis money to pay for various courses and retraining for their staff members, provided they don't lay them off. Two-hundred neo-Nazis marched in Plzeň. „That it is in its most serious crisis since 1989,“ replied Vladimir Klokočka, former constitutional judge and one of the country's most prominent legal authorities, when asked by Lidové noviny how he would describe the current state of the Czech judiciary in the face of the abuse of justice in ex-minister Jiří Čunek’s corruption case. Statisticians calculated that last year the largest number of children was born in the Czech Republic since 1993. An animal welfare campaign, Slepice z klece ven („Hens Out of the Cage“), aimed at compelling the Agriculture Ministry to support more compassionate local poultry breeders, kicked off on Wenceslas Square. Komerční banka started selling gold bricks to interested parties.