Last week 39/09

The first snow fell in the Alps. A pavilion was built for the Pope at the airport in Brno, and city leaders decided they would give Pope Benedict XVI a bronze chalice to commemorate his visit to the southern Moravian metropolis at the end of September. A Korean company bought Plzeň-based Škoda Power. World Trade Organization experts began a meeting in Geneva aimed at identifying today's key business problems. Mushrooms started growing again. The Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) abandoned its plan for early elections and announced that they would be held in the regular term, early next summer. To protest against the Social Democrats' decision, Civic Democratic Party (ODS) Chairman Mirek Topolánek resigned his parliamentary seat and left the chamber, where he says there are only "Communists, post-Communists and former Communists." Fischer's caretaker government has threatened to resign if parliament fails to approve its thriftier draft budget, accounting for a deficit of 150 billion crowns instead of 230.
"The Czech political scene changes so rapidly that it is becoming somewhat indecipherable for other EU members," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, whose country currently presides over the European Union, said in Brussels. President Václav Klaus announced that he was planning to go to Russia for talks. Rival mafias had a shoot-out near Slovanský dům (Slavonic House) in Prague's city center. A year passed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which officially ushered in the world financial crisis. Conductor Jiří Bělohlávek played a vacuum cleaner at London's Royal Albert Hall. The government's economic council (Národní ekonomická rada), formed to minimize the impact of the economic crisis, wound up its work with a message to the government: "Raise taxes and reduce social expenditure."
"In cities, people can see only a few hundred stars; here we counted nearly two thousand," said Wrocław (Breslau) astronomer Sylwester Kołomański, explaining why he and his Czech colleagues decided to declare a "darkness conservation area" - the Jizera/Izera "Dark-Sky Park" - in a remote part of the Liberec Region. An online legal clinic for Czech neo-Nazis was created. Thanks to the work of Mladá fronta Dnes reporters, it was discovered that the energy giant ČEZ, in which the state is the majority shareholder, has contracted to build a short-term nuclear fuel storage facility for one and a half billion crowns with a company whose owners are hiding out in Liechtenstein while one of its executives is currently in custody for preparing the kidnapping of its second executive, Jiří Kovář, former chief of staff for Václav Klaus's government. Parliamentary deputies passed a law complicating the felling of trees along roads. The owners of TV Nova obtained a license for the Czech version of MTV. The Ústavní soud (Constitutional Court) issued a landmark decision on sui juris, describing the stripping of one's legal capacity as a "relic of the old regime."
"The mere fact that someone suffers from a mental disorder does not constitute grounds for restricting his or her legal capacity; specifically who or what is threatened by the person's full legal capacity must always be stated," declared the court, adding that the justice system must always consider all the less invasive alternatives to stripping someone's legal capacity, which Czech courts have not been doing to date and are criticized for by domestic and foreign human-rights organizations. A fisherman caught a two-meter-long catfish at Hracholusky dam. The Czech-Roma "Coexistence Village" ("Vesnička soužití") in Ostrava celebrated the seventh anniversary of its founding. The Bezpečnostní informační služba (Security Information Service; BIS) began monitoring the activities of Big Board, whose management offered free advertising space to Ne základnám ("No Bases"), the organization which led the campaign against the US radar base in Brdy; Aktuálně.cz cited an unnamed BIS official who says that Russia uses Big Board to support its political and commercial interests in the Czech Republic; Big Board called the BIS official's claim "nonsense." Tučín near Přerov was named Vesnice roku ("Village of the Year") for 2009. The economic crisis drove up prices of exotic fruit. Eighteen thousand paying visitors attended a Robert Vano photography exhibition at the Mánes gallery in Prague.
"A great revolution is waiting for us. For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos. The crisis not only makes us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants economic performance to be measured in the future by happiness, well-being and sustainability instead of by "outdated" GDP. Summer ended.