Last week 49/08

Terrorists launched a war on Mumbai. Burger King arrived in the Czech Republic. There were huge layoffs across the country because of the manufacturing crisis. Tatra sent 20 percent of its employees packing. News agencies reported that after 26 years in prison, Christian Klar, a former terrorist, kidnapper and murderer from the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) who never expressed regret for his actions, was set free in Germany. Prague 6 city hall opened the country's first playground for seniors. An earthquake killed two miners in Karvín. The Czech constitutional court unanimously ruled that the Lisbon Treaty on the EU's inner workings is not incompatible with the Czech constitution, and treaty opponent Czech President Václav Klaus called the verdict an „amateurish and politicized decision.“ Bystřice nad Pernštejnem reconstructed the traditional executioner's place on Hora hill. Power companies announced that they would raise the price of electricity in the next year. „I've got a hand drill and a sander tucked away at home and I think it's going to come in handy soon; I've also got candles, kerosene lamps and kerosene in my house,“ Svatopluk Chodura, a 62-year-old pensioner from Slezká Ostrava, told Lidové noviny as part of a survey entitled, „How they're planning for electricity price hike.“ The publishing house Ringier stopped publishing its free daily, 24 hodin. The media reported that the defense lawyer for one of the men being tried for murdering the „inconvenient“ journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow said that, according to the case file, the murderers had worked on order from a „certain Russian politician“; the court then banned the public from further hearings and expelled a member of the jury who had objected to that conclusion. The management of the Russian oil concern Lukoil expressed interest in acquiring Czech refineries. The price of petroleum dropped to the lowest level it has been in three years. „I stood up from the operating table and I simply saw… It was amazing,“ said Hana Charvátová, 61, from Vsetín, describing the outcome of a rare corneal operation through which physicians at the Zlín hospital restored her sight after being blind for 16 years. The emergency healthcare facility in Humpolec closed down because of a low number of patients and high operating costs. Prague's MeetFactory announced that Acampante would perform there next week. Car manufacturers asked the government to help them out with the downturn by subsidizing people who want to buy a new car, but the finance minister sharply rejected that possibility.

„I'll write Jesus with my Christmas wishes a week before Christmas, not now,“ said Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, commenting on the fact that Prague Mayor Pavel Bém, who running for the chair of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), had called for the Czech Republic to take advantage of its European Union chairmanship to propose replacing the Lisbon Treaty with a „short document of a completely different form and content.“ The European Commission presented its plan to rejuvenate the economically stagnating continent. Prague's new traffic police chief, Leoš Tržil, announced that in an effort to improve safety on Czech roads, he wants to focus above all on stringent recourse for pedestrians who abuse their right of way on crosswalks, „rushing out in front of cars and forcing them to brake.“ „Although people want a change, it looks like they don't want it now or they don’t want this change,“ said former Central Bohemian Regional Commissioner Petr Bendl of the fact that his ally Pavel Bém's popularity in the Civic Democratic Party has nosedived and his chances of winning the party's chairmanship have dropped to almost zero. In the villages around the Dukovany nuclear power plant, citizens rehearsed what to do when rusted pipes in the nuclear power plant there burst and cause a nuclear accident. Cardinal Miloslav Vlk ordained Jan Baxant as Litoměřice’s new bishop. The chief of the general staff of the Czech army, Vlastimil Picek, informed the public that he has already sacked 20 high-ranking officers during his year-long crusade to clean up the army. The Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) promised voters that it would raise the taxes of those making over 40,000 crowns per month if it won the parliamentary elections. The tool bag that American astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost while repairing the International Space Station could be seen in the night sky through a telescope as it orbited around Earth; at the same time, the space station's astronauts announced that they had lost one of the two spiders they had brought there from Earth in the Endeavor space shuttle in order to understand the scientific question of how spiders weave webs in zero gravity. Gas leaking from a bad gas-flow heater killed a father and son in Třebíč. The government passed a law on how to complain properly.