Last week 47/2006

Seventeen years passed since Communism ended and freedom returned. A Christmas tree appeared on the main square in Olomouc. Fallen leaves on railway tracks delayed trains on the route between Písek and Tábor. This year’s November 15th was the warmest in the last 80 years. “I like coming back here. I was happy here,” Countess Anna Maria Waldstein (80) told the Třebič press while on a visit to search the local archives for traces of her ancestors. The European Parliament approved a directive aimed at liberalizing services. Gutters on a bank and a church disappeared overnight in České Budějovice. Pope Benedict XVI rejected Cardinal Miloslav Vlk’s invitation to visit the Czech Republic, saying he had to concentrate on his already promised and approved visit to Austria. Throngs of citizens gathered at a memorial near Žernov in the Šumava Mountains to commemorate the famous hunt in which forest ranger Johann Jungwirth headed a one-hundred head group of hunters and chasers and shot dead the last bear in the Šumava, or to be precise, female bear. Free text messages returned to the Internet. Construction of the Czech Republic’s first “solar park” for producing electricity from the sun began near Ostrožská Lhota. The number of Czech roadway deaths returned to the old record days (15 people per weekend) and the police and authorities refused to explain what was behind it. A careless driver ran into a tight formation of North Korean female sweatshop workers and seriously injured five returning to the grounds of the clothing company Oresta in Bavoryně from a night excursion. “I won’t tell you anything, it’s our private matter,” Věra Čermáková, co-owner of the company profiting on the North Korean sweatshop workers, brushed off reporters’ questions about the women’s fate. With a width of 77.5 centimeters, Koželská street in Tisňov won the contest for the narrowest Czech street. Decathlonist Roman Šebrle was named Best Czech Athlete for the fifth time. Czech Airlines continued its plunge into dramatic losses. Bohemia Glassworks stopped its operation in Antonínův Důl and laid off eighty employees due to financial troubles. The police concluded that, due to negligence for working procedures, the head of the construction project from the Hradec Králové company B. C. Building was responsible for last year’s collapse of a new hockey stadium roof in Humpolec, which failed to withstand the weight of snow, and charged him with endangering the public. Seventy-seven new cases confirmed a suspected trend: the number of AIDS cases in the Czech Republic is on the rise again. Příbram football boss Jaroslav Starka, the highly controversial, evidently gangster-dealing businessman who miraculously survived a murder attempt in which he was shot through the stomach with a submachine-gun not long ago, was arrested by a special commando unit for suspicion of kidnapping and murder. “Jarda’s definitely not guilty – in our matches now we’re going to fight extra hard for him, to please him, and we believe he’ll be back with us soon,” said Marila Příbram coach František Barát, commenting on Starka’s arrest. Delvita decided to sell its Czech grocery store chain to Billa. The secret service prevented the sale of Czech weapons to violence-ridden Iraq. In the framework of celebrating work on the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., U.S. Congress bestowed the prestigious Freedom Medal on Milada Horáková. The case of the Volineks, a landowning family from Žíchovec near Prachatice, was filed at the European Court in Strasbourg; during collectivization, the local National Committee chairman, Antonín Sobr, denounced the family as “enemy bourgeoisie” only to – once the family had been moved out, its property confiscated, and the head of the family locked up in prison for years – seize one of the houses in the farming complex for himself; Sobr’s descendants still live in the pilfered house and Czech courts have refused to return the Volineks’ property, saying that everything is fine and that communist Sobr “had not abused his position for personal benefit.” “I’m in New York, so I’m rooting for the Rangers,” pronounced former Czech President Václav Havel after watching the local hockey team’s victorious match in which Jaromír Jágr shone bright and scored two goals. Sea eagles and golden eagles appeared on the shores of the Tovačov Lake District. Vodafone attracted 170,000 more new clients. News agencies reported that Al-Qaeda was planning to carry out attacks in Europe over the Christmas holidays. The top people’s court in Peking rejected a petition from the competing American brewery Anheuser-Busch and ruled that Budvar may export to China.