Founded in 1893, Lidové noviny has boasted prestigious contributors such Karel and Josef Čapek, and Eduard Bass. Banned during World War II and under the communist regime, it resurfaced after the Velvet Revolution with the help of a group of Czech dissidents including Jiří Ruml and Jiří Dienstbier, democratic and independent credentials intact. With a strong international outlook, it is famous for being the first paper to caricature national figures. The Czech Republic’s second highest-selling daily, the People’s Paper, although increasingly mainstream, remains the journal of the intelligentsia. Like its sister paper the top-selling DNES, Lidové noviny belongs to the MAFRA media group.
One of the most consistently informative and entertaining blogs about the European Union has to be Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles.
When presseurop.eu was launched in May last year, one of its guiding mottos was Umberto Eco’s “The future of Europe is translation.” But sometimes I’m inclined to think that the future of Europe is lost in translation. I recently checked a statement by Angela Merkel concerning the CD-rom nabbed by HSBC supergrass Hervé Falciani containing data on Germans who have siphoned off their money to Switzerland in order to avoid taxes back home.