Chaos engulfed plans for the state military parade in Warsaw just days ahead of the centenary
The country’s rightwing government broke the law by logging in one of Europe’s last primeval forests setting up a clash between Brussels and Warsaw.
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/ 20 January 2012
Afghan incident shows it is no longer surprising that violence and cruelty are self-documented, writes Jonathan Jones.
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/ 27 November 2008
Polish border guards have foiled an attempt to smuggle kangaroos, miniature ponies and 11 pheasants across Poland’s border with Ukraine.
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/ 31 January 2008
Piotr Kucy (38) from the city of Polkowice in south-west Poland was wrongly identified by authorities last August as a drowned man, only to show up a few days after his own funeral. Despite pointing out the fact that he was alive to government officials, Kucy still remains dead in official records, stopping him from working and paying social insurance.
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/ 25 January 2008
An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter. Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11,1km.
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/ 11 January 2008
Accusing Poland of having forced out Jews who survived the Holocaust, historian Jan Gross sparked a backlash ahead of the Friday launch of the Polish edition of his book, Fear. ”Until now, no one has ever written like Gross … about the attitude of Poles towards the Jews,” said historian Pawel Machcewicz, a fierce critic of the Polish-born Jewish writer.
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/ 10 January 2008
A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees. Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.
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/ 21 October 2007
Poles began voting on Sunday in a snap parliamentary election that could cost the ruling Kaczynski twins their full grip on government in the European Union’s biggest former communist country. Opinion polls suggest a centre-right opposition party might do best in the vote.
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/ 5 September 2007
A Polish crime writer has been jailed for 25 years after authorities found he had committed a murder that had been described in one of his thrillers, officials said on Wednesday. In his 2003 book Amok, Krystian Bala described in detail the brutal murder of a Polish businessman.
Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski revealed on Thursday that he doesn’t have a bank account and instead hands his salary over to his mother. "I still don’t have a bank account," the 57-year-old conservative premier said in an interview with the weekly news magazine, <i>Wprost</i>. "I’m not joking. I keep my money in Mum’s account," he said.
Poland’s education minister on Wednesday called for a ban on the ”propagation of homosexuality” in the country’s schools, a plan that he argues would protect traditional family values. Education Minister Roman Giertych’s outspoken views on homosexuality have attracted condemnation abroad in recent months.
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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.
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 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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/ 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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/ 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.
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.