The week at a glance...Europe

Prague

Kicked on the way out: The Czech Senate has charged outgoing President Vaclav Klaus with treason for his New Year’s Day amnesty, which released more than 6,000 prisoners. Some of them have already reoffended, but the measure was unpopular mainly because it canceled several high-profile corruption cases in which top businessmen and officials were accused of illicitly pocketing millions of dollars. Klaus’s term in office ended this week, and if found guilty, he will lose his pension and the right to run for president again in the future.

Berlin

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Nazi prisons everywhere: The Nazis maintained more than 42,000 camps and ghettos across Europe, far more than had previously been identified, Holocaust researchers now say. For more than 10 years, historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have been compiling records of all the slave-labor camps, brothels, death camps, and ghettos set up from 1933 to 1945, mostly in Germany and Poland. Berlin alone, it turns out, had 3,000 such sites. “We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the numbers are unbelievable,” said Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. The documents cast new doubt on the notion that ordinary Germans did not know of the horrors being visited on their Jewish neighbors.

Bern, Switzerland

Fat cats beware: The Swiss have voted overwhelmingly to ban lavish signing bonuses and “golden parachute” payouts to corporate CEOs. The referendum, which passed this week, also gives corporate shareholders a binding vote each year on executive pay. The new law is the result of a decade-long crusade by Thomas Minder, a Swiss senator and toothpaste manufacturer. His company lost its contract to supply Swissair when the airline went bankrupt, and he was outraged to learn that Swissair’s last chief executive, Mario Corti, received five years’ salary as a signing bonus but held the post for just a few months.

Rome

Cardinals gather: The Vatican has closed the famous Sistine Chapel to tourists in preparation for the conclave to elect a new pope. The meeting won’t start until next week, but the Swiss Guards have already arrested one impostor who tried to slip in dressed in fake cardinal robes. The tip-off was that the impostor was wearing a fedora rather than a cardinal’s skullcap. One cardinal not in attendance is the U.K.’s top cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who resigned amid accusations that he had made sexual advances toward several priests. This week he admitted the charges were true. “There have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop, and cardinal,” he said.