Saramago toughs it out with God squad
Author José Saramago is in trouble again. His latest book, Cain, has sparked a string of denunciations, with one MEP even demanding that the Nobel Prize winner be stripped of his Portuguese citizenship. “The most controversial of Portuguese writers”, as Diario de Noticias has it, appeared surprised by the outrage of Catholics “because they do not read the Bible”. In a press conference, the Lisbon daily reports, Saramago declared that his only conclusion over this controversy is that “the church is untouchable”. Having stated that, “The God of the bible is not to be trusted”, or that the “bible is a rosary of incongruities”, he hopes that the book will be treated as “a literary work” and that religious protests should not degenerate into “an insult on the author’s person”.
In a time of crisis with high unemployment, young Lithuanians are following in the footsteps of their emigrant ancestors. Tens of thousands have left the country in search of a better life, mainly in the British Isles and Scandinavia. The weekly Veidas reports: 
The new Eurogroup meeting on February 9 is not enough to banish the spectre of a Greek bankruptcy. While Athens may largely be responsible for the crisis, the EU and its partners are not blameless themselves. La Stampa argues that their confused messages and the absence of any strategy have transformed a resolvable problem into an explosive chaos. 
Two camps, two theories, and two visions of France: 18 years after the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis, the precise role played by Paris is still the subject of heated debate, fueled by the findings of successive criminal investigations.