Last week 14/2006

Melting snow raised the level of rivers, and authorities warned there was a danger of major flooding. A three-year-old record high of 20º C in České Budějovice for the end of March was broken by a temperature of 22º C. The deadline for turning in tax returns on time lapsed. Claudia Cardinale received in Prague the Kristian Award for contribution to global cinematography. Culture Minister Vátězslav Jandák caught up with President Václav Klaus in a popularity contest. The turbulent Elbe River paralyzed half of Ústí nad Labem. Flood waters drew a young boy into a drainage ditch near a fire reservoir in Boňov, then into a conduit from whose entrance someone had previously stolen the protection grating; the boy drowned along the long way to Boňov pond. Waters washed over the spillway of Vrana Dam.

“The third major floods in the last nine years. The Czech Republic is starting to get used to floods,” wrote Mladá fronta DNES. The final farewell to Jaroslava Moserová took place in the Strašnice Crematorium. The Senate returned the Labor Code to the Chamber of Deputies. Representatives of the Chinese company Changhong Europe Electric laid the foundation stone of its future plasma television factory on a meadow near Nymburk. A multitude of relatives of people who had disappeared without a trace at the end of the war gathered in Ústí nad Labem, for it emerged that the German People’s Association for Caring for Wartime Graves had recently laid in one of the abandoned halls four thousand boxes holding the remains of the bodies of Germans who had been exhumed from various mass graves in the Czech Republic by the association’s members, who are now trying to raise money to transport their remains and hold funerals in their homeland. “We even received a call from a woman in America asking if we could find out if the remains of her relative were here; we referred her to the People’s Association because we don’t have any records of the remains,” Ústí’s archive director Vladimír Kaiser told Lidové noviny. Found in archives were reports from a “confidante” whom the communists had installed in Milada Horáková’s cell to inform them of what the sentenced-to-death woman was thinking about and what concerned her. Jiří Raška (65) of the Czech Olympic Skijumpers Committee received the Fair Play Award for Lifetime Achievement. The government announced it would allocate 20 million crowns this year to support Belorussian dissidents’ fight against the regime of dictator Lukashenko. Prague customs officials seized counterfeit brand-name shoes worth more than one quarter billion crowns in a warehouse on the outskirts of the capital. The first Roomsters rolled off the assembly line in Škoda Auto’s Kvasim factory. Nancy Petschek, the great granddaughter of Ignaz Petschek, a self-made man who worked his way up from bank messenger to bank manager and mine-owner and one of the richest men in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, came to the Czech Republic to inspect the homeland of her ancestral roots; her family was forced to flee from the Nazis due to their Jewish ancestry and their property worth billions was stolen. “If it is not remedied immediately, I will propose personnel changes – even at the deputy chairman level,” Prime Minister and Social Democratic (ČSSD) elections leader Jiří Paroubek declared after it surfaced that ČSSD Deputy Chairman Martin Starec had sent party members the wrong number so they couldn’t influence telephone voting during a television debate between Paroubek and his election opponent Petr Gandalovič (Civic Democratic Party – ODS), which the prime minister lost entirely. Bird flu arrived in the Czech Republic: three swans in South Bohemia died of infection by the H5N1 virus, which is deathly to them and transferable to other species. South Bohemian authorities declared an immediate ban on free movement of poultry and launched stringent monitoring of compliance with the ban. The European Commission threatened Microsoft that if the company included an internet browser in its Windows Vista application – which would make life harder for small manufacturers – Brussels would ban its sale on the European continent. ČSSD promised voters that if it won this summer’s elections the party would give every newborn Czech child sixty thousand crowns from the taxpayers’ money. “In the early eighties I was a driver for the State Security Service, I didn’t know any opponents of the communist regime, I never interrogated them, let alone tortured them,” Zbyněk Dudek, the former StB member renowned in the eighties for being one of the most brutal members of the “thrashing command,” a group of StB agent who forced into exile selected opponents of the regime by beating, torturing, and threatening them, testified before a court in Prague. John Bok was named one of the election leaders for former Nova TV director Vladimír Železný’s party. News agencies reported that Michael Jackson was planning to transfigure himself into a completely different person: he intends to set off on his upcoming tour with DJ Whoo Kid as a beefy, bald rapper.