Last week 4/08

Karl Ludwig Habsburg, son of the last Austrian-Hungarian Emperor, was buried in Vienna. The enrolment of first-graders commenced. The American financial crisis arrived in Europe. Nobody will avoid it. The economies of Central Europe will also be affected, Hospodářské noviny cited the words of the experts of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, rebutting the opinion of local specialists that “nothing can happen to us.” Czech stocks fell by tens of percentage points. The Ministry of the Environment declared a war on plastic bags. Litvínov was left without hot water for half a day due to a damaged hot-water pipeline. Police brought the fugitive Barbora Škrlová, the girl from the infamous “Kuřim child abuse case,” who occupied the Czech police and media for a year with no results, from Norway to Prague. It became apparent that the producer of computer games from Brno that the Americans purchased is called Illusion Softworks and not Illusion Network, as Respekt has been thinking and writing until now. The number of local entrepreneurs increased to 918 thousand. Presidential candidate Jan Švejnar visited the Moravian metropolis of Brno on his trip across the Czech Republic. Why? He is only an ordinary man off the street after all – next time, if I overstate it a little, we could invite bin Ladin, for example, Brno Representative Petr Paulczynski (ODS) responded to the reporters’ question as to whether he agrees with Švejnar being invited to visit the City Hall there.

Whoever votes for Švejnar is impotent, former Prime Minister and avowed “impotence hunter” Miloš Zeman told Czech newspapers over the telephone. Members of Parliament from the Christian and Democratic Union – Czechoslovak People's Party then announced that they would not be supporting Švejnar, but rather Václav Klaus. Statistics showed that people are spending less time in front of the television. A young man from the South Bohemian town of Kaplice that made an illegal copy of The Simpsons Movie on a video camera last year in the cinema and made it freely available for download over the Internet received a 150 thousand crown fine in an out-of-court settlement. Nicole Vaidišová was the only women’s tennis player that advanced to the further rounds of the Australian Open. News Agencies reported that Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the pair of men who, in 1953, were the first to climb to the top of the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, passed away in his native New Zealand. A team of BBC reporters disguised as charity workers caused European-wide horror and disgust when they secretly infiltrated into eight Czech institutes for handicapped children and, with a hidden camera, filmed how the staff locked their wards into illegal cages and left them to live like animals in a zoo. Those aren’t cages, but beds with sides, one Czech official commented in Lidové noviny on BBC shots of a child curled up in the foetal position in a cage of steel bars; however the Czech Ministry of Social Affairs admitted that it will have the British reporters’ discovery “investigated.” The Arca investment company bought the Natura starch factory. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek decided to cancel state-subsidised meal tickets and economists warned that this would cause a storm of protest. After years of exhausting and ardent research, scientists came to a shocking and entirely-unexpected discovery: during its travels from Canada to its winter home in Mexico, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexipus) navigates according to the sun. The research isn’t finished though. Now it is necessary to discover where the butterfly’s solar compass is located, one of the members of the discovery team, entomologist Ivo Šauman from the Biological Centre in České Budějovice, commented on the success achieved. A nine-month fight over wages between Czech Airlines and its pilots ended with an increase in pay. Karel Gott got married in Las Vegas. Newspapers reported that police in communist China, the exemplary organisers of the next Olympic Games, beat a man to death that tried to take a photograph on his mobile phone of how a special police unit beat up villagers protesting against a government plan to make them a garbage dump right next to their homes. Another giant automobile factory headed to the Czech Republic. Agriculture Minister Petr Gandalovič promised Czech farmers that their fields will go up in price. Astronomers discovered that a gigantic hydrogen cloud is heading to the Milky Way. It was written, with reference to BBC's astronomical groups, that its collision with our galaxies in 20 to 40 million years will lead to an explosion that will spawn millions of new stars. Participants vied for the title of the Czech children’s champion in hip hop in Brno’s Semilaso