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/ 20 February 2007
Polish author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, several times cited as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on January 22 at the age of 74, TVN24 television reported. Kapuscinski’s books have been translated into 30 languages, arguably more than any other Polish author.
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/ 20 February 2007
Google has launched legal action against a group of Polish poets, demanding that they give up their internet domain name <i>Gmail.pl</i>, a member of the cultural collective said on Friday. The domain belongs to GMAiL — the "Grupa Mlodych Artystow i Literatow", or Group of Young Artists and Writers.
A Russian oil pipeline carrying supplies across Belarus to Poland and Germany stopped pumping overnight in a trade dispute between Moscow and Minsk that could lead to fuel shortages across Europe. Only last week the ex-Soviet states promised to put their argument to one side and keep providing oil to the rest of Europe.
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/ 23 November 2006
The toll in one of Europe’s deadliest mining accidents for years rose to 22 on Thursday, as rescue workers at a southern Polish pit discovered more bodies and hopes faded of finding the remaining missing miner alive. Rescuers who have been battling hellish conditions at the Halemba mine at Ruda Slaska in Poland’s Silesian coalbelt since a methane gas blast on Tuesday found 16 more bodies.
The Nazis used human fat to make soap during World War II in a Nazi German medical academy located in what is now the Polish Baltic sea port city of Gdansk, Polish war crimes prosecutors confirmed on Friday, pointing to new laboratory tests.
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/ 27 September 2006
Poland’s political crisis deepened on Wednesday after a television broadcast of secretly filmed meetings sparked calls for the prime minister to step down. The ruling conservatives of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski are trying to build a new majority coalition after ditching their leftist partners Self-Defence last week in a row over the budget and a decision to send troops to Afghanistan.
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/ 6 September 2006
Prosecutors in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland have asked priests to read out the names of drink-drivers from the pulpit as part of efforts to reduce the country’s high road death rate. Church leaders have not said yet whether they will support the scheme, aimed to shame drivers into sobriety.
A Polish priest with a penchant for a bet has slipped out of his parish in the central Polish town of Lowicz, taking with him the collection box, local press reports said on Thursday. The faithful at the Holy Spirit parish in Lowicz were a bit bemused at not seeing Father Franciszek Augustynski since mid-May.
Polish and German security officials teamed up on Thursday for an exercise in subduing aggressive, unruly Polish football fans, many of whom are expected to try to cross into Germany for this summer’s World Cup. ”The conditions of this exercise were very close to what we would expect in real life,” said Jacek Ogrodowicz, a spokesperson for the Polish border guard.
Tourists and young couples ambling through the historic centre of Krakow on a warm spring afternoon were stopped in their tracks by a sight reminiscent of the era of martial law. As drinks flowed in the open-air cafes of Poland’s ancient royal capital, a phalanx of armed police in full riot gear inched its way slowly through the medieval city.
Polish education inspectors have banned a CD with a painting by Hieronymus Bosch reproduced on its cover from being distributed in schools, saying the picture, entitled <i>Hell</i>, could harm young people. "There are pornographic scenes in the Bosch picture that can damage people," said one school inspector.
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/ 21 February 2006
A university in Poland has banned an exhibition of T-shirts bearing slogans such as "I didn’t cry when the Pope died" and "I’ve got Aids," saying the show was too provocative, press reports said on Tuesday. "The texts printed on the T-shirts could have offended the feelings and beliefs of many people," said Wieslaw Kaminski, president of UMCS University.
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/ 9 February 2006
Poland’s Roman Catholics expressed outrage on Thursday after a magazine published a picture of the much-revered icon of the Black Madonna with pop icon Madonna’s face transposed on to it. Ultra-Catholic daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik slammed the photo as ”another act of profanation of sacred symbols”.
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/ 29 January 2006
Rescuers searched in bitter cold on Sunday for victims buried when the roof of an exhibition hall in southern Poland collapsed on a racing pigeon show, killing at least 60 people and injuring 141. The death toll rose steadily through the early hours of Sunday as rescuers dug through the building following its collapse at around 5.30pm. (4.30pm GMT) on Saturday in the city of Katowice.
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/ 24 January 2006
Bone-chilling weather claimed dozens of lives on Monday across Europe as glacial temperatures swept the Baltics to the Balkans, brought rare snowfalls to Istanbul and sparked a scramble for heating fuel. The unusually low temperatures have left well more than 100 fatalities in Germany, Poland, Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic.
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/ 18 January 2006
In the corner of the dimly lit entrance hall of a Soviet housing block in the Warsaw suburb of Wolomin, housing Chechen refugees, a middle-aged man toys aimlessly with a large switchblade. Children’s voices ring down from the upper storeys of the building, home to between 200 and 300 Chechens who have fled the war in their north Caucasus homeland to end up at one of 17 refugee centres in Poland.
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/ 24 October 2005
Poland’s leading Law and Justice party launched formal coalition talks on Monday, with a strengthened hand a day after its candidate, Lech Kaczynski, won the presidency. Kaczynski won with 54% of Sunday’s vote, compared with 46% for opponent Donald Tusk, of the pro-market Civic Platform party.
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/ 20 October 2005
An unknown gay rights group claimed it planted a dozen fake bombs around Warsaw that paralysed the Polish capital on Thursday, three days before the second round of a presidential election. ”You paralyse our life, we’ll paralyse yours,” a lengthy e-mail sent to media groups in Warsaw said, referring among other issues to a ban on a gay pride parade by Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski.
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/ 19 October 2005
Poland’s left-wing government, led by Prime Minister Marek Belka, resigned on Wednesday as the Lower House met in a brief first session following its solid shift to the right in last month’s elections. President Aleksander Kwasniewski accepted the resignation at a ceremony at the presidential palace later on Wednesday.
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/ 21 September 2005
If identical twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski succeed in their bid to ensnare the two highest posts in Poland in upcoming legislative and presidential elections, they would present their fellow Poles and world leaders with a conundrum. How do you tell them apart?
One of Poland’s leading newspapers printed a front-page apology on Friday for running a story based on an anonymous source that turned out to be false. The report helped lead to the ouster of the country’s deputy interior minister. The daily took the unusual step of revealing the source’s identity.
Europe has never been so strong, safe or united, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told leaders from across the continent as he opened the Council of Europe’s ”unity” summit at Warsaw’s Royal Castle on Monday. ”Never before has Europe been so strong, so safe, so close to being united,” Kwasniewski said.
Thousands of Jews and other people from around the world gathered in southern Poland on Thursday to march through the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust. Under a grey sky and occasional hisses of rainfall, the crowd made its way to the main camp at Auschwitz.
Belgium’s Kim Clijsters reached the quarterfinals of the WTA clay-court tournament in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday, defeating 18-year-old Maria Kirilenko of Russia 6-2, 6-1. Clijsters dominated most of the match, conceding her serve just once, immediately after taking a 2-0 lead.
As an unfortunate quirk of fate would have it, the avenue that runs through the heart of the Polish capital, Warsaw, bearing the name of native-born Pope John Paul II is a high holy place for sex shops, a Polish newspaper pointed out on Wednesday. The avenue’s residents have repeatedly asked city authorities to intervene.
The parents of newborn Polish triplets — all boys — have named their sons Jan, Pawel and Karol, in homage to Pope John Paul II, the babies’ father said on Thursday. ”At this very special time, we wanted to pay homage to the pope, and we thought our sons would be happy to have these first names,” the father said.
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/ 28 February 2005
Councillors of a western Polish village were to decide on Monday whether to allow controversial German scientist Guenther von Hagen to set up a laboratory for preparing human corpses for public display. Von Hagen Bodyworld exhibition of plasticised corpses has been shown amid heavy public debate across Europe and the world.
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/ 4 February 2005
Polish lawmakers will be paid half their salary if they are "jailed temporarily" but won’t receive their daily parliamentary allowance, the Upper House Senate voted on Thursday. Senators voted 63 in favour and six against an amendment that made a distinction between temporary detention and fully-fledged imprisonment
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/ 27 January 2005
World leaders and death-camp survivors mourned victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Thursday, gathering at the place where Nazi doctors once sent new arrivals to the gas chambers. The ceremony opened with the sound of an approaching train.
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/ 27 January 2005
World leaders were on Thursday to stand side-by-side with about 1 000 survivors of the Auschwitz death camp for an emotional ceremony under a blanket of snow to mark the camp’s liberation 60 years ago. Ten thousand people were expected to pay tribute to the at least 1,1-million people who died at Auschwitz.
Polish police said on Friday they have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing a 200m-long, 360-ton bridge, which had then been sold to a scrap-metal yard. The bridge disappeared earlier this month and was found by police at the scrap-metal yard, cut into metre-long pieces.
Television reporter Waldemar Milewicz, killed in Iraq on Friday along with his producer, was Poland’s best-known war correspondent and the winner of numerous journalism awards for his reporting from Chechnya, Afghanistan and other conflict zones. Poland’s president called Milewicz’s death a loss for the entire nation.