Last week 8/08

News Agencies reported that the recently-deceased Maharishi Mahesh was cremated in his native Allahabad at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. The Government sent Parliament a draft bill for people to retire at 65 years of age. Christians celebrated the 150th anniversary of the miraculous moment when the Virgin Mary appeared to fourteen-year-old Bernardette Soubirous in a cave in Lourdes. I was shocked by that case and I simply wanted to make that girl happy, a citizen of Plzeň told reporters after giving a new telephone to a seventeen-year-old girl after reading in a newspaper that she had had her mobile phone stolen by three robbers when she was hit by an epileptic seizure on a street in the centre of Plzeň. The first part of the Czech reconstruction team flew to Afghanistan to get its province of Logar back on its feet. The High Court, behind closed doors, decided that statute of limitations applies to the judicial murder committed by the communists in 1950 on democratic politician Milada Horáková and that prosecutor Ludmila Brožová, who had recently received eight years imprisonment from a lower court for proposing the death penalty for Horáková, can go home. That speech took me back thirty years and amused me, Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg commented the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov’s performance at the Security Conference in Munich, in which the notorious Russian hawk confirmed the existence of a “new cold war,” declared by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last year at the same forum, and warned the Czech Republic to stop cooperating with the USA and to stop negotiations on the establishment of an American radar base in the Brdy hills. Meteorologists reported that it isn't true that winter will not come back this year since it seems that it will return at the end of February. Caritas opened a new asylum house for families in distress in Znojmo. The head of the police decided to exchange the white-green colour of its cars for aggressively-colourful reflective patterns because, according to police psychologists, it “instils respect” in people.

That bill is similar to the one that Hitler asserted at the beginning of the 30’s, representative František Laudát (Civic Democratic Party) commented on his fellow party member Boris Šťastný's proposal for smoking to be banned in restaurants in the Czech Republic just like in a number of West European countries. The communists sent their own candidate, former television moderator Jana Bobošíková, against the two existing candidates for the post of President of the Republic, Václav Klaus and Jan Švejnar. A mail carrier in Řepová na Šumpersku died under her own car, which she had braked improperly, and then when it started rolling down the hill towards her she tried unsuccessfully to stop it. A Prague court began proceedings against Viktor K., against whom someone made a denunciation that he tunnelled sixteen milliard crowns from Harvard Funds twelve years ago during coupon privatisation. I was outraged by the offer and asked him who he thinks he is, and he told me that Václav Havel and financier Zdeněk Bakala are offering the same thing on the other side; so they – meaning the Civic Democratic Party, have to too, independent senator Josef Novotný told Lidový noviny about his discussion with an unnamed member of the upper house of Parliament for the Civic Democratic Party, who allegedly offered Novotný two million crowns to vote for Václav Klaus during the Presidential elections. The crown went up to 25.46 crowns per euro. Topolánek’s cabinet decided to free up more money for the prevention and treatment of the deadly disease AIDS, now spreading again. An unknown mother abandoned a three-day-year-old girl in the babybox in Prague's Hloubětín district. Nobody has to force me to do anything nor did anyone ever force me, Representative Evžen Snítilý of the Czech Social Democratic Party told the Právo daily in answer to the question, “Were you forced to cooperate with the military secret service during the 70‘s?“; news of Snítilý’s cooperation with the secret police appeared after this representative did not support his party's candidate, Jan Švejnar, in the first presidential election and was seen with Civic Democratic Party representatives who were urging him to vote for Václav Klaus; Snítilý collapsed after one such “urging” from Interior Minister Ivan Langer and he had to be taken with heart problems from the Castle to the hospital by ambulance. Newspapers reported the death of Tom Lantos (80), the last American congressman to survive the Holocaust. Ostrava’s THeatr ludem opened an exhibition of Rudolf Šmíd’s photographs of scarecrows entitled Smrt není (There Is No Death).