Last week 23/09

After a heat wave came storms. The world was shocked by the news that North Korea's totalitarian regime test-launched atomic bombs of the same power as the one which wiped out Nagasaki in World War II. Ninety-two thousand lightning strikes flashed over the Czech lands. Finance Minister Eduard Janota announced that he would like to freeze wages in an attempt to stop the menacing growth of the state deficit. Snow fell in the mountains. The head of the Social Democrats (ČSSD), Jiří Paroubek, challenged the police to protect his campaign meetings against the growing number of people who, in protest against his politics, throw eggs at him.
"The Nazis in Germany came to power because democracy was not strong enough and couldn't overcome such skirmishes," he said, explaining his demand; the rival Civic Democrats (ODS) asked the egg-hurlers to cease their actions because Paroubek could become a victim in the eyes of the public and win the election. After 67 years a monument to the heroes who assassinated Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich was unveiled.
"I apologize for my unfortunate statement – to me, an animal is not a thing, it is a living creature, but a person is much more and this must be clear at the beginning," replied Cyril Svoboda, a former minister in Topolanek's government and a candidate for leadership of the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL), in answer to a Mladá fronta Dnes reader's question, "Are you truly convinced that an animal is a ‚thing‘ as you stated in your proposal for the civil code?" Several frightened individuals independently notified authorities that they had seen a bear near the municipality of Stará Ves. A young Czech Airlines pilot brought swine flu to the Czech Republic from New York. After staunch protests from the Education Ministry, the Masarykova elementary school in Valašské Meziříčí withdrew its proposal to conduct separate classes for Roma and "Whites." An unknown culprit tried to throw a pair of Molotov cocktails into a Roma household in Zdiby. Sex is the most interesting and least costly entertainment in a time of crisis, said experts in the pages of Lidový noviny, explaining how it's possible that at a time of universal economic decline in all economic areas, the market for goods related to sex is growing. Kaufland let its customers pay with cards. Following a purchase from a Czech private collection, a ceremonial sword made in 1667 under Archduke Franz Karl I for Count Johann Wilhelm Von Kolowrat as a symbol of Moravian authority and independence, was returned to Moravia. It was revealed that Bohemians and Moravians have different DNA.
"There's no moolah, the Bohemians swiped it all to build a longer tube," said a speaker for a Moravian political party on a TV campaign spot, complaining that the Bohemians had taken all the money from Moravian coffers to build a longer metro in Prague. A night of fireworks took place on the Brno dam. Seventy years past since the birth of Batman. Parties interested in law opened Uninova, the first private law school in the Czech Republic. ZZ Top played in Prague. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) revealed that water treatment plants that have been built recently release much warmer water than they take in and that fish, primarily trout, in local streams and rivers are dying in droves. General David Petraeus, commander of the US forces in the Middle East, visited the Czech Republic.
"The good news is that certain rodent species - field mice and Japanese rats - have no Y chromosome and no SRY gene, which are responsible for male gender development, but there are a great many of them in the world, so another gene must have taken over that function and we are looking for it," the press quoted Jennifer Graves, the British scientist who discovered that the number of genes in the "male" chromosome have shrunk from 1,400 to 45 in the past 300 million years, which apparently means that men could die out in, at most, 5 million years. A freight train hit a 19-year-old youth who, for unknown reasons, was walking along the train tracks from Otrokovice to Tlumačov. Spirit is in a very complicated situation, a spokesperson for NASA announced after the aforementioned robot became ensnared in a sandy trap on Mars. The government decided to raise retirement pay by 300 crowns next year.