Last week 5/08

Eleven-hundred years elapsed since the birth of St. Wenceslas, the Duke of Bohemia. By opening its first Czech shop on the site of the former Malostranská kavárna in Prague, the American coffee giant Starbucks came to the Czech Republic. The price of plasma TVs dropped. Former Czech president Václav Havel was hospitalized for cardiac arrhythmia. “Stock markets panicked,” wrote Hospodářské noviny, commenting on the dramatic, worldwide slump in stock prices. Bioveta announced success in the development of a vaccine against Lyme disease. News agencies reported that chess king Bobby Fischer had passed away in Reykjavik. Czech Railways decided to start selling Sky Europe airline tickets at its railway ticket sales counters. Valašské Měziříčí-born songwriter Markéta Irglová and her partner, Irish songwriter Glen Hansard, were nominated for an Oscar for their song “Falling Slowly” from the film Once, which they co-starred in. “A miracle,” experts designated the luck of a man who survived a fall in an elevator from the fifth floor of an apartment building in the Litvínov housing estate Janov; the Czech association of elevator producers then warned the public that 50,000 of the total 80,000 elevators in the Czech Republic do not meet basic safety regulations, and that entering them is risking your life. Warm weather increased the risk of dangerous avalanches in the mountains. The trial of “heparin killer” Zdeněk Zelenka, 31 – a health care worker who murdered at least seven patients at the Havličkuv Brod hospital by injecting them with solutions of the anticoagulant drug heparin – began in Hradec Králové. An inspection ordered by former defense minister Jiří Šedivý revealed massive embezzlement and theft of public money in the Czech General Staff. Interior Minister Ivan Langer (Civil Democratic Party) bestowed President Václav Klaus with a medal of merit in connection with the Czech Republic's entry into the Schengen zone; President Klaus exceptionally contributed to the Schengen admission process by, for example, his statement that the abolition of the borders is a mistake and that he personally was never bothered by the “little two-minute delay” on the border in the pre-Schengen era. “I felt like a comedian there,” said Klatovy plumber Josef Patlejch outside a courthouse in Pilsen, describing how he felt when he entered a bank in Dobřany last year and went from counter to counter with a note saying “give me money, I don’t want to hurt you” until one bank teller became frightened and handed him 40,000 crowns; the court took into account Patlejch’s situation at the time – following a recent divorce, the death of his 3-year-old daughter, and the bankruptcy of his company, he needed money to care for his dying mother – and sentenced him to a two-year suspended sentence for the robbery after which he was apprehended immediately. Ten of the largest supermarket chains took control of two-thirds of the Czech market. A missile launched by rebels injured two Czech soldiers guarding the airport in Basra, Iraq. With last year’s capacity of 932,016, the number of cars manufactured in the Czech Republic beat the previous record. The European Commission introduced a series of “green laws,” which should have a major impact on the amount of green houses emitted and the cleanliness of the economy on the whole continent in upcoming years. “These measures will increase industrial production costs and have a negative impact on the competitiveness of European countries on the global scale,” Czech Industry Minister Martin Říman said of the new European norms. The management of the Czech prison system decided that people held in custody while awaiting trial would not be dressed in prison uniforms but in jeans. The court returned the government chateau in Kolodějich near Prague to its rightful heirs. The Czech police received two dogs from Ireland that are capable of sniffing out hidden pirated copies of films on DVDs. Topolánek’s cabinet approved a plan to pay out 270 billion crowns in compensation to the Church for property stolen by the state after the communist putsch in 1948. One hundred years passed since the day theoretical physicist Lev Landau was born in Baku. Vendelín Čtvrtek, a newborn found among garbage bins just before Christmas last year, was given adoptive parents and ended her stay in a state-run infant care facility. The Czech Business Inspection posted a list of banned, dangerous, and poisonous toys on the internet. The first Buddhist temple in Bohemia was opened in Varnsdorf on the initiative of the local Vietnamese community. A STEM agency studied revealed that one-third of all residents of the Czech Republic began this year with a resolution to change their life for the better. “The price of butter is dropping. But not enough,” a front-page headline on Mladá fronta DNES remarked on developments in the food market.