Last week 39/08

The first snow fell in the mountains and heating plants began operation. Meteorologists warned citizens that an Indian summer was still set to arrive. World markets were shaken by the failure of the fourth largest investment bank in the USA - Lehman Brothers - and shares on the Prague Stock Exchange plunged by 333 billion crowns. „This is the crisis of the century,“ the headline on the front page of Lidové noviny warned readers. „I admit that I'm not sleeping too peacefully. Clouds are closing in on the global and even the Czech economy more and more,“ Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek told Mladá fronta Dnes. Statisticians calculated that Czechs had bought a record number of films on DVD. Javelin thrower Barbora Špotáková broke the world record in Stuttgart with a throw of 72.28 meters. An engineering trade fair began in Brno. After 17 years of operation, one of the first music clubs in post-Communist Czechoslovakia - Karlovy Vary's Propaganda, later named Rotes Berlin - closed down due to financial troubles and disputes with city hall. The musician Richard Wright died. Newspapers reported that Paul McCartney intends to marry for the third time. It was learned that the Czech truck driver who caused one of the biggest accidents in the history of the Prague-Brno highway this summer (and died in it as one of two victims) was driving under the influence of drugs and without a driving license, which had been revoked due to driving under the influence of alcohol. A symbolic funeral was held in Zlín for the recently deceased Tomáš Baťa, Jr. The number of Japanese tourists visiting Prague declined. Former Prime Minister Miloš Zeman collapsed at the Znojmo wine harvest festival and had to be taken to the local urological clinic for surgery due to renal colic. „Because doctors recommended that I drink lots of liquids, and did not specify which kind, I have just opened my first beer - and it certainly won't be my last,“ Zeman told Právo, describing how he is doing since being released from the hospital. Treatment facilities reported that they can hardly cope with the influx of alcoholics. A former helicopter base in Plzeň's industrial zone burned down. The high court in Prague ruled that two former police officers from Jičín have to apologize and pay 100,000 crowns in compensation to a Romany family whom they had attacked and brutally beaten in their flat under the pretext that „gypsies steal“; the Hradec Králové court that had first handled the case did not even grant the victims an oral apology or compensation on the grounds that the attack was not so terrible. The Moravské zemské muzeum (Moravian Museum) in Brno prepared an exhibition, „Tracing the Footsteps of Jan Eskymo Welzl“ (Po stopách Jana Eskymo Welzla). A hepatitis epidemic broke out in Central Bohemia, Vysočina and Prague; authorities have announced quarantining in some Prague schools. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek visited Ukraine, where the democratic coalition had just collapsed under pressure from pro-Russian forces and influences.

„I dreamt that I would have a beautiful family - and so far I have none,“ one of the women whose newborn was exchanged with another in hospital in Třebíč a year ago told a Brno court; after the mix-up, the woman and her husband raised and considered the newborn as their own for 10 months, when they had to return it in exchange for their own daughter, unfortunately a „stranger“ to them; today, both affected couples are demanding a total of 12 million crowns from the Třebíč hospital for the emotional damage they have suffered, which the hospital's management calls „impracticable nonsense.“ The Brno dragon celebrated its 400th birthday. Pleas, a textile manufacturer, decided to close its factories in Chotěboř and in Čáslav. The decline in European auto sales continued. „If politics were ever drained dry, it was not today but during the opposition agreement era, when they became interconnected with organized crime, when the watchdog role of the opposition was erased and when materials began to be abused or fabricated for economic and political purposes while the cowed police looked the other way - and that state continues until today,“ Prime Minister and Civic Democratic Party (ODS) Chairman Mirek Topolánek said in response to comments by President and Civic Democratic Party Honorary Chairman Václav Klaus that the „crisis and emptiness of current politics“ is to blame for the increasing number of political scandals. „I have to raise my eyebrows and resolutely, ceaselessly, staunchly disagree - nothing of the sort could have happened,“ Klaus, the chief architect of the opposition agreement, said in response to Topolánek's words in a speech made shortly before becoming an honorary citizen of Velká Bíteš.