Last week 20/09

The Czech Senate approved the Treaty of Lisbon. After a cold spell, hot weather returned. Newspapers reported that the pro-Western government in Georgia had undermined a coup attempt organized and paid for by the Russians. The crisis knocked down the salaries of managers. The new Czech prime minister, Jan Fischer, presented the ministers in his Cabinet. Natural gas companies reported that gas rates may drop in the fall.
"I am so upset that I might just take a grenade and throw it at them; we have been working all week long to turn a buck on those do-nothings and then we can't even get a good night's sleep because of the noise - and the authorities and the police really can't stop it?" said the mayor of the village of Budkov, Miloslav Záškoda, commenting on the fact that a properly declared and officially permitted techno party took place in a remote area 10 kilometers away from his village.
"Those people have nowhere to be, they get run off wherever they go, but they are our children, and even out grandchildren, so why not accommodate them? While I do not like their music at all, I can endure it," farm-owner Miroslav Skalický, who lent his land to the party organizers, told Mladá fronta Dnes. Nové Město climber Radek Jaroš climbed to the peak of Mount Manaslu, the "Mountain of the Spirit," in the Himalayas, and thereby found himself 8,163 meters above sea level. A neo-Nazi march stopped traffic in the center of Brno. The media reported that Kenyan women had declared a sex strike and begun to deny their husbands sex as a protest against the current bickering among male politicians, which could send another wave of violence through the country; Ida Oding, the wife of Kenya's prime minister, joined in the strike. The incoming finance minister, Tomáš Uvíra, has estimated this year's Czech budget deficit at 200 billion crowns.
"Climbing up to such high altitude, in the late afternoon and at the beginning of May - that is unreal improvidence," the Austrian press commented on the decision of five Czech mountaineering enthusiasts who decided to ski downhill from the peak of Schalfkogel and were all killed by an avalanche. The management of the České Švýcarsko ("Czech Switzerland") national park planted 200,000 more salmon fry into the Kamenice River. Chrysler declared bankruptcy. Underground corridors in Jihlava began to glimmer. The European Commission continued to work on a draft law under which every citizen of the European Union could be cut off from the internet if caught illegally downloading copyright-protected works three times. No candidate applied for the job of director of Bory prison in Plzeň.
"They violated our internal code of ethics and they must not do that even in their private lives," said TV Nova director Petr Dvořák, explaining why reporter Jiří Dlabaja was immediately dismissed over a privately taped video clip showing him and a few friends making light of swine flu by snorting and grunting. Unknown poachers shot a bear in the Beskydy mountains and the environmental organization Hnutí Duha announced a reward of 100,000 crowns for the culprits' capture. At the Sparta stadium in Prague, Czech football international Tomáš Řepka brawled with a fan who disliked the fact that Řepka's wife had called a child footballer with a dark complexion a "stinky black brat" during a junior match between Sparta and Jablonec. In an Ostrava hospital, a two-year-old Roma girl, whose body was severely burned by a fire that broke out after unidentified attackers threw Molotov cocktails into her family's house in Vítkov, began to breathe unassisted, without equipment.
"Both parties to the dispute are exploiting this issue to gain media attention, and the only one to suffer is the upright citizen," said Chomutov Mayor Ivana Řápková (ODS), explaining why she decided not to permit local Roma residents to hold a demonstration against neo-Nazis and growing racism. Plastic replicas of the names of Holocaust victims were mounted on the gravestones at the national cemetery in Terezín to replace the original bronze ones that were stolen en masse one year ago by a gang of thieves. Prime Minister Fischer's Cabinet decided to try to buy out Shell's shares in the strategically important company Česká rafinérská, in order to prevent the crude-oil processor from falling into Russian hands.
"The European Union disappeared off the map under the Czech Presidency," an unnamed associate of French President Nicolas Sarkozy remarked to Le Figaro regarding the Czech Republic's performance while presiding over the European Union, and the daily newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes called his words "a slap in the face." Scientists found that aspirin works the best for heartbreak.