Last week 3/08

High winds gave way to black ice. A small boy perished below a weir on the Opava River not far from the village of Háj ve Slezsku when he broke through the ice he was walking on. Mortgages went up in price. The Chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) Jiří Paroubek and his wife went to the spa town of Bardejov on their honeymoon. Statistics showed that the Czech Republic obtained a net total of 18 and a half milliard crowns from Union coffers this year. I am extremely pro-European, if only someone else was as pro-European as I am, Václav Klaus, the current head of state and author of the idea that the European Union is something like the former Soviet COMECON, told representatives of the Christian and Democratic Union – Czechoslovak People’s Party (KDU–ČSL) while visiting their group in the attempt to obtain votes before the presidential elections. The Stock Božkov distillery announced record sales of spirits. Five people were injured when a city bus collided with a newsstand in Prague 8. The deputy director of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute Radim Tolasz warned citizens to not fall prey to apathy and to not become indifferent to the causes of the current climatic changes and extreme weather fluctuations. That could be the beginning of the end, stated Tolasz, who is known as a resolute advocate of a more responsible approach to environmental protection. Starbucks came to the Czech Republic. In an attempt to attract more tourists and school trips, the Přerov Town Hall decided to build a new Mamutov complex at the site of the local Předmostí prehistoric excavations. Škoda Auto initiated a huge advertising campaign in India. New details in the investigation revealed that the recent crash of a private Czech airplane in the Ukraine, which resulted in the deaths of all five Czech citizens onboard and one Ukrainian woman in the house the airplane crashed into while attempting an improvised landing in a field, was caused by the gross negligence and errors of the crew, which flew from Karlovy Vary without sufficient fuel supplies and the pilot even let a completely inexperienced businessman without the necessary tests and licenses fly the plane in extremely adverse climatic conditions. Czech expenditures approached those of the Union. Josef Koudelka celebrated his 70th birthday. This is a truly chilling joke: the budget for 2007, which was created more clerically than politically during the post-election chaos and which should have been the worst possible budget, fared much better than the government planned that the reform budget plans for 2008, 2009 and 2010 should turn out, financial analyst Tomáš Sedláček stated, commenting on the sums which revealed that last year’s deficit from public finances will not actually be 90 milliard as the government planned, but only 64 milliard crowns. “This clearly shows, for the third year in a row, that every year Czech ministries receive tens of milliards of crowns more than they need or can manage to spend,” Sedláček added. This year’s uninterrupted fall of the Prague Stock Exchange continued. The number of injuries in the mountains increased. Newspapers reported that Bill Gates announced the end of all of his executive work in Microsoft at an electronics trade fair in Las Vegas. It became apparent from the published memoirs of former dosimetrist Milan Antolík that in 1976 there was an accident in the Jaslovské Bohunice nuclear power plant on the territory of the former Czechoslovakia that didn’t end up in a destructive explosion identical to the one in Chernobyl thanks only to the courageous efforts of the technicians on duty. Prague’s Scarabeus gallery displayed masks and spooks. It was characteristic for Czechs and Slovaks that during meetings they were not aware of the necessity of reaching some goal and, getting entangled in many sub-goals, they couldn’t come to the essence; I asked my managers here – Do you have a solution? No? Then think, you get paid for it, the director of the multinational construction company Deceunick, Tomáš Klíma, told Hospodářské noviny, when explaining what surprised him the most when he returned to the Czech Republic as a highly-placed manager after studying and working abroad for many years. In Kněževes nearby Prague archaeologists discovered a waste pit with human bones that reposed here for five thousand years as mysterious remains of the Urnfield culture. Jan Švejnar, a candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, set out on a tour of Czech and Moravian towns. Vendelín Čtvrtek, the newborn baby that a homeless person found discarded in a garbage can in Prague before Christmas, moved from the hospital to a children’s home. The American giant Take-Two Interactive Software bought Brno’s Illusion Network. CD Players were dropped from the consumer shopping basket.