Last week 24/09

Waldemar Matuška died. News agencies reported that an Air France Airbus with 228 people on board had mysteriously disappeared from radar and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. A new skate park opened in Bystřice nad Pernštejnem. Czechs cast their ballots in the European parliamentary elections. Cold weather struck the country and snow covered peaks in the Krkonoše (Giant Mountains).
"I expect an apology from the Italian media to me, my family and my son," announced parliamentary deputy Lucie Talmanová (Civic Democrats (ODS)) after Italian newspapers reported that her partner, former Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, had been photographed naked last year while on holiday at the villa of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The regional court in Ostrava began insolvency proceedings with Baník Ostrava. The decline in the value of apartment slowed. Jan Fischer's Cabinet proposed saving public finance from the brink of collapse through bigger cuts in social benefits, and representatives of the main political parties swept the proposal under the rug as a "quixotic attempt that lacks respect for political reality and has no chance of success in the pre-election period." Sixty years passed since the day Czech Communists murdered General Heliodor Píka. Česká televize (Czech Television) began broadcasting a 10-part documentary film titled Proces H, about the monstrous trial in which the Communists sentenced opposition party member Milada Horáková to death.
"What campaign disruption? I believe it was Gottwald who disrupted the campaign when he staged the trial in June. Elections are in June everywhere in the world, and the television station is broadcasting the series to mark the 59th anniversary of the trial," Proces H director and screenwriter Martin Vadas responded in Lidové noviny to current Communist Party (KSČM) chairman Vojtěch Filip's complaint that Česká televize had "undermined the election campaign and harmed the Communist Party" by broadcasting the film. Dweezil Zappa played Frank Zappa at Prague's Divadlo Archa theatre. The city of Třebíč decided to restore a mysterious footpath that has linked the center of town to the Romanesque-Gothic St. Procopius's basilica for centuries. Pavel Nedvěd ended his football career.
Cyril Svoboda became the new chairman of the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL). It was revealed that the street lamps around Brno's Špilberk castle are decorated with the emblem of Prague.
"I would rather attempt using a functioning website," replied ČSSD chairman Jiří Paroubek when asked by the media whether or not he would try to tackle his internet illiteracy and sign up for a profile on Facebook. Scientific studies revealed that due to a healthy and ample diet, the human race has grown in the last hundred years, and humans are now about as tall as the mammoth-hunters were. Companies began to leave tax havens. Radio Free Europe moved from the city center. Ile de Sein, a painting by artist Marie Čermínová - aka Toyen - was auctioned for 6.5 million crowns in České Budějovice. Statistics showed that car-scrapping bonuses have not helped the ailing auto industry. Natural gas prices dropped. The director of Český rozhlas's (Czech Radio's) Roma broadcasting service, Anna Poláková, left for Canada with her entire family and requested asylum there.
"We are impelled to do this by the radicalization of Czech society and the constant attacks that we personally have faced," Anna Poláková wrote to her boss; her son has been attacked on the street by Czech neo-Nazis several times and even suffered serious injuries from one such attack. New car sales rose. To prevent pieces falling on pedestrians, a cracked sculpture of women and a cog wheel was removed from Brno's train station and sent for restoration. A Czech Airlines pilot recovered from swine flu, which he contracted in New York. Iscare, a private clinic in Prague, announced that it would provide free plastic surgery to nurses who sign a labor contract with the clinic lasting at least three years.
"Politics has become coarse," Václav Havel, the Czech Republic's first president, declared in Plzeň when accepting the city's Cenu 1. čevna ("June 1 Prize"), which is bestowed on "important advocates of freedom and democracy" by city hall on the anniversary of the 1953 anti-Communist revolt there. Flour and diesel fuel got cheaper. British Conservative Party leader David Cameron visited Prague. Služba škole, an educational services agency in Zlín, presented a new methodology manual for teaching Czechoslovak history. Meteorologists informed the public that warm weather would come in June.