Last week 43/2005

Nicole Vaidišová won a tennis tournament in Bangkok. This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was bestowed on Harold Pinter. Newspapers reported that Germany has banned raising poultry outside due to the bird flu threat. Nineteen people died on Czech roadways in one weekend. The institution for the mentally handicapped in Těchobuz prepared an afternoon of entertainment and contests called “Colorful Autumn” for its clients. Snow covered Lysá Mountain. The volume of Czech consumer loans from banks and other lenders has surpassed 375 billion CZK. The Czech humanitarian organizations Adra, People in Need, and Catholic Charity opened bank accounts for donations to help the victims of the earthquake in Kashmir, where people – injured and completely homeless – are still waiting for rescuers to arrive in inaccessible areas, where they await the harsh Himalayan winter in provisional tents.

Rescue teams have managed to help hundreds of thousands of people, but there are still an estimated half a million injured whom no one has managed to reach, said World Food Program Chief James Morris, commenting on the situation in Kashmir. Newswires reported that Saddam Hussein’s trial had begun in Iraq. A broken water pipe halted potable water supplies from Vír Reservoir to Brno. “USA and EU Days” were held in Prague’s Žofín Palace for the fourth year running. The president’s office announced that on the national holiday on October 28th the highest national decoration – the Order of the White Lion – would be bestowed on anti-Nazi and anti-Communist resistance hero General Rudolf Pernický (90), whose left leg had to be amputated by doctors at Central Military Hospital last week. Thirty-eight Czech exhibitors left for the book fair in Frankfurt on Mohan. Premier Jiří Paroubek visited Paris, where President Jacques Chirac announced that France would not open its labor market to new Europeans from the East. That is true. And that’s also why I don’t eat meat – I just don’t want to harm living beings, replied Sparta football’s new coach Stanislav Griga when a Lidové noviny reporter asked him, “So the rumor that you told a player off for smashing an ant on the table isn’t true?” Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda opened the new Czech Cultural Center in the eastern Slovakian city of Košice. An unknown assailant killed a man walking in the woods outside of Malínkovice near Kladno by shooting him in the head and heart. Someone killed an elderly couple collecting brushwood in the woods near the southern Moravian town of Nedvědice in the same way. The police subsequently learned that all the motiveless murders were committed by a 28-year-old Slaný resident, a graduate of the Police Secondary School in Prague. The management of Czech Switzerland National Park had two fish ladders built on the Kamenice stream enabling salmon and trout to pass through the Edmuntov and Divoká soutěska dykes, which till then had complicated their journey from the Atlantic Ocean back to their birthplace. David Rath was supposed to replace dismissed Health Minister Milada Emmerová, but President Václav Klaus refused to name him. That was stupid, pointless, short-sighted behavior and I will naturally offer my resignation to my party colleagues – it is my duty, said Hradec Králové Representative and Deputy District Commissioner Miloslav Plass (Civic Democratic Party – ODS), reacting to the fact he had been caught driving with alcohol in his blood during a routine traffic check. The Wood Exposition was held in Brno. Drummers gathered in Havlíčkův Brod. Twenty-two thousand voters in Great Britain and the USA ranked Václav Havel fourth on a list of “the world’s most influential intellectuals;” Noam Chomsky topped the list and Umberto Eco ranked second. In an interview for Mladá fronta DNES from the Seychelles Islands, businessman Radovan Krejčíř, on the lam and facing fraud charges, said that he lent then deputy chairman of the Social Democrats (ČSSD) Stanislav Gross 60 million crowns in 2002 for the party’s treasury through his business partner Jakub Konečný (who recently disappeared without a trace). CzechInvest appealed to Czech citizens to learn English because it would increase their chances of not ending up on welfare. Exhibited in the Křtiny ossuary were twelve totally unique human skulls, all bearing laurel wreath crowns painted on with an unidentified black dye and the letter “T” on the forehead. They are the only painted skulls ever found in the Czech Republic, so they are undoubtedly those of wholly exceptional figures, said ossuary director and local vicar Tomáš Prnka, describing the new exhibit to journalists. All Czech dailies reported on their front pages that Nedvěd would return.