Last year 1/2006

Climatologists announced that the year 2005 had broken the 1998 record and become the warmest year in known history. Hail the size of eggs fell in Kojčice. After Al-Qaeda's bomb attacks in London killed fifty people and immobilized the subway system, Prague reinforced protection of its strategic buildings. „I haven't changed physically, but my soul changed, I look at the world differently and see that life is beautiful, glorious! No question about it,“ Krnov carpenter Jan Chalupa (51) told Mladá fronta Dnes after being released from Brno's cardiac center, where doctors gave him a new heart, kidneys, and liver in a unique transplant operation. The cost of registering .cz domains fell 100 CZK.

Deputies passed a new criminal act. Anti-Nazi and anti-communist resistance movement hero Rudolf Pernický died in a Prague hospital at the age of 90. iPod penetrated the Czech market. FAMU's administration apologized to art historian Anna Fárová for sacking her in the 1970s as punishment for signing Charter 77; together with the apology, Fárová also received a lilly of the valley nosegay from the dean of FAMU. The STEM agency learned from a public opinion poll that four out of 10 Czechs would not mind if the communists governed here again. „Lice win,“ was Mladá fronta Dnes's headline for an article on the news that the company Lybar Velvěty stopped manufacturing its lice-killing treatment Difusil H 92M. Small boats returned to the Ostravice River in the center of Ostrava after a 100-year absence. The National Museum's collection was expanded by a stuffed polar bear that had died after 28 years of imprisonment in the Prague Zoo. Construction of the Czech polar station began on Antarctica's James Ross Island. Eighteen Czech Roma youth filed suit against the Czech Republic at the European Court of Human Rights for automatically and discriminatorily sending most Czech Roma children to special schools and thereby condemning them to the low standing of uneducated, second-class citizens; the court agreed to hear the Roma children's lawsuit. Pope John Paul II died and Pope Benedict XVI took his place. Sixty years passed since the liberation of Auschwitz. „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 reaction to the Iranian president's comments in a speech that the „Holocaust is a myth“ and that „the Jews must be moved from Palestine to Alaska.“ The expected bird flu pandemic helped pharmacists sell their stock of all flu vaccinations, but the disease never came. Czech authorities definitively approved the liquidation of the Czech Central Mountains by approving construction of the D 8 highway. Billionaire Radovan Krejčíř fled from Černošice to the Seychelles just after the police indicted him on multiple counts of fraud and arranging a hired killing. The city council made a sandy beach for Prague residents on the Smíchov levee of the Vltava River. Newspapers reported that a US Voyager space probe flew beyond the Sun§s magnetic field and surpassed the border separating the solar system from free and practically unknown space. Pavel Bergmann died. Photographer Jan Lukas celebrated his 90th birthday. „Not going with the crowd paid off for us,“ Dalibor Dědek, the director of the Jablonec-based company Jablotron, said commenting on the fact that his company's product – the world's largest mobile phone, which is as big as a normal telephone – met with great success on markets from Hong Kong to New York. In a nationwide survey of TV-watchers, Charles IV won the "Greatest Czech title. Karel Mein Gott gained the Golden Nightingale title for the 31st time and had his hip joint replaced in Germany. The Czech delegation's vote in Ulsan, South Korea contributed to the International Whaling Commission's decision that crushed Japan and its allies’ hopes of lifting the ban on commercial whaling. Škoda Auto produced its five-millionth vehicle. After state-provoked death threats, intimidated farmers sold their fields so Hyundai can build a car-manufacturing plant near the northern Moravian town of Nošovice. Parliament approved a criminal points system for undisciplined drivers. Protected bank swallows settled in the Přerov heating plant's fly ash pile. The volume of consumer loans from Czech banks and credit companies rose from 300 hundred million to four hundred billion crowns in one year. Ustí nad Labem district commissioner Jiří Šulc ordered the felling of trees on the crest of Říp Mountain so visitors would be able to see as far as Grandfather Czech once did. A UNICEF poll revealed that two-thirds of all Czech children are almost always happy.