Last week 26/2006

The summer solstice arrived. With a performance of 34.2º C, the weather broke its 56-year-old record for June 21st. The emerging Civic Democrat-Christian Democrat-Green government coalition agreed on a flat tax, a coal tax, and the need to ensure independent investigation of police wrongdoing. Pre-vacation polls revealed that half of all Czechs will stay at home during their holiday. The music of Dimitri Shostakavich opened the Prague Proms music festival in Prague’s Smetana Hall. Vlasta Průchová died. During a visit to the Czech Republic, a representative of the Korean car-maker Hyundai swore that his company would definitely begin building the planned assembly plant in Nošovice, Moravia in early December regardless of the fact that its CEO is currently incarcerated.

“I'll probably remember the moment of the impasse in the elections and the certain sense of frustration that getting our little country moving in a positive direction woiuld once again be difficult,” replied Czech President Václav Klaus in Mladá fronta magazín, whose reporters had asked him on the occasion of his 65th birthday, “In five years’ time, what will you remember of the time you turned sixty-five?” A public Řevnice town council meeting was broadcast live on the Internet for the first time ever. It surfaced that hundreds of tons of deadly poison are delivered to substandard storage facilities in Chvaletice with the authorities’ consent. U.S. President Goerge Bush admitted at an American-European summit in Vienna that U.S. visa requirements for ten EU member countries, including the Czech Republic, represents a problem that “something must be done with.” Summer sale season broke out. A nineteen-year-old man survived being struck by lightning at a natural swimming pool near Sokolov without any injuries. The upper chamber of parliament proposed instituting by law the National Memory Institute, which would gather, study, and make available to the public documents from the era of communist tyranny. “The piece seemed shocking and avant-garde in the conservative space, many viewers displayed indignation after just ten minutes,” wrote a Hospodářské noviny critic, describing the audience’s reaction to a performance at the Estates Theatre, which introduced Czech composer Jiří Doubek’s new opera Beng!, which deals with the love story of a young gypsy woman and a white guy from Prague. Losses with Ghana and Italy ended the Czech national football team’s participation in the World Cup in the qualifying round. European Commission experts tested the quality of water in 176 Czech reservoirs before the holidays, and after the tests a ban on swimming was imposed on one-tenth of them. In a final ruling, the Prague Municipal Court ruled that St. Vitus Cathedral belongs to the church. On the occasion of the 61st birthday of the Burmese democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, former Czech president Václav Havel and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on the U.N. Security Council to take a hard-line position against the cruel military dictatorship in Burma and to give the “beleaguered people of Burma a means to an irreversible path to national reconciliation”; several dozen people concurrently demonstrated in Prague in support of Suu Kyi. Natálie Kocábová released the album Hummingbird in Iceland. Piana Petrof became profitable again. After a long and hopeless battle with the authorities, Austrian hotelier Dietmar Hehenberger hacked off with a chainsaw the piece of the roof of his hotel that – as Czech surveyors learned five years ago – extends a few centimeters over the Czech-Austrian border. “It’s a serious violation of international agreements, but although Mr. Hehenberger was originally supposed to raze a full chunk of the hotel, the joint Czech-Austrian commission ultimately decided to tolerate the wall even though it stands just a meter from the border; but it is impossible to not bat an eye at the roof, which actually encroaches on the Czech territory,” Interior Ministry spokesperson Petr Vorlíček said of the case. The police announced they would rigorously pursue the murderers who sentenced Milada Horáková to death in a show trial in 1950, that they would not abate even for a minute, and would pursue them on the ground, in the air, and even in the water. The Ministry of Agriculture began working on a new decree which would enable short sausages to be displayed on shop counters, which was banned by decree in 2003. The domestic stock exchange overcame its crisis and raced toward growth. Petr Lorenc, founder of the live improvisational theatre Krepsko and author of the screenplay for the film Czech Dream, died in a car accident in Poland. The media reported that 20-pound notes rained down from the skies in Wales, and that thousands of people received the same amount by post in envelopes marked “Do you believe in angels?” Meteorologists announced the public that the current scorching temperatures will last at least another thirty days.