Last week 51/2005

The Peace Light from Bethlehem arrived in the Czech lands via the border crossing in Mikulov. Harry Potter landed on the shelves of bookstores for the sixth time. The government gave civil servants a 700-crown raise. The managers of the Bavarian Forest and Šumava national parks reached an agreement on cooperating and taking a joint approach to expand the forested area left to nature’s own devices. Former President Václav Havel came out against Prime Minister Paroubek’s plan to cancel government guaranteed mining limits and give the coal barons a free hand to further expel people from their homes and plunder the northern Bohemian countryside.

“North Bohemia received a huge blow with the forcible resettlement of Czechs and Germans – and the loss of identity could be topped off by the definitive resettlement of reason,” Havel wrote Paroubek. The supervisory board decided that former defense minister Jaroslav Tvrdík would remain at the head of the loss-making Czech Airlines. The temperature dropped and snow fell. Works by George Dokoupil were exhibited in Brno. Thanks to Germany’s willingness to raise Berlin’s contribution to the joint treasury, the European Union’s budget for 2007–2013 was approved in Brussels. František Bébar (94), a man proclaimed dead for fifteen years, had himself treated at the surgical policlinic in Prostějov. A gale force wind blew over the republic and the Prague Castle was closed to the public due to the risk of falling roof tiles. “I lost money due to your bad decision not to sell. For that, I’ll kill you or one of those closest to you,” an anonymous author wrote to all the landowners who refused to sell their land near the northern Moravian town of Nošovice and thereby thwarted the automobile manufacturer Hyundai’s construction project in which Prime Minister Paroubek and Industry and Trade Minister Urban are very involved; after the threat, all the resisters decided to move out of the state’s way and sold their plots. The international steel company TSR auctioned off the bankrupt scrap iron processing company Unikov Ostrava for half a billion crowns in Brno. Karel Gott took the Golden Nightingale award for the thirty-first time. In its National Language Education Plan, the Ministry of Education proposed to make English a mandatory subject in Czech schools for children from the age of eight. Cigarettes were marked up. The civic group Tančírna Třešť (Dance Hall Flavor) held the three-day theatrical festival Loutkování (Puppetry) in its town. Despite protests by Christians and opposition from the people’s party (KDU-ČSL), parliament passed a law allowing people of the same sex to enter into a registered partnership for a communal path through life. “It makes sense to provide people various advantages, concessions, or honors only for practices requiring self-negation, thus for resisting their own nature – for example, fear, the yen to betray, take bribes, etc.; the institute of partnership of two people of the same sex, of course, for the first time in history, gives advantages and social prestige for a practice consisting in simply succumbing to their own inclinations,” prominent Czech catholic intellectual Pavel Bratinka wrote in Mladá fronta DNES. Hungary’s Food Inspection seized in Budapest warehouses several tons of rotten poultry from the Czech Republic. Prague’s Archa Theatre placed the Phil Glass and Franz Kafka opera In the Penal Colony on its program. On the basis of the lustration law, local “top manager” and vice chairman of the board of the power giant ČEZ Petr Vobořil lost his job because it came out that prior to 1989 he was a member of the regime’s militia and took an oath to kill anyone posing a threat to communism. The České Budějovice Regional Authority gave the green light to Temelín Nuclear Power Plant. Local authorities in the Pakistan-controlled region of Kashmir extended the mandate of a team of physicians which has been fighting the clock for two months already to save people affected by the devastating earthquake and left by the rich world without aid; agencies notified that of the roughly three million afflicted “perhaps hundreds of thousands won’t survive the freezing temperatures that the impending winter will bring.” A children’s bathtub that changes colors according to the temperature of the water became one of this year’s Christmas hits. Newspapers cited a speech by Iran’s president in which he pronounced before a gathering of Iranians in Zahedan that the “Holocaust is a myth” and that “Israel must be moved to Alaska.” “We stand before a great crisis – Israel will hardly stand by and watch a country with a leader like that complete its path to obtaining nuclear weapons,” political scientist Jiří Pehe wrote in Hospodarské noviny. Climatologists released a report that the year 2005 surpassed the 1998 record and became the warmest year in known history. A live nativity scene traveled through the Jizer Mountains from Dobrá Voda to Jablonec nad Nisou. King Kong invaded the theatres.