There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

ZDENEK HORENI, the former editor of Rude Pravo and leading correspondent for the Morning Star’s sister paper Halo Noviny, died in Prague’s Thomayer Hospital, on Friday February 12 2021, at the age of 91.
His long, rich and adventurous life as a campaigning journalist was shaped by his experiences of growing up under the Nazi occupation, by the February revolution of 1948 and by the struggle to maintain socialism in Czechoslovakia and latterly, the Czech Republic.
Born in the northern town of Frydstejn, on February 9 1930, on the fault line between Masaryk’s young republic and Hitler’s Germany, he witnessed the collapse of Czechoslovakia after the Munich accords of 1938 and the seizure of his hometown as part of the Sudetenland, territories effectively gifted by Western liberal democracy to Nazi Germany as the price of appeasement.

As the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia rebuilds support through anti-cuts campaigns, the government seeks to silence it before October’s parliamentary elections through liberal totalitarianism, reports JOHN CALLOW


