Free Republic

Walesa unveils one more for the 'Gipper'     Lech Walesa said that there would not be a free Poland without Ronald Reagan, during the unveiling of a statue in Warsaw of the late American president on Monday.   photo - PAP/Andrzej Hrechorowicz The former Solidarity leader said that “as a participant in these events,” it was “inconceivable” that such changes would have come about without the last American president during the post-1945 cold-war era.Walesa added that thirty years ago, it seemed that the fall of the communist system would not be possible without a nuclear war.The bronze statue of...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A transsexual woman and an openly gay man took seats in Poland's newly elected parliament Tuesday, historic firsts that reflect profound social change in this traditionally Roman Catholic country. Anna Grodzka, who was born a man but underwent a sex change, entered the assembly hall to warm greetings. Several men and women shook her hand, while one male lawmaker kissed her on the cheek. She was later introduced to Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who also shook her hand.

A Boeing 767 flying from New York with 230 people on board made an emergency landing at Warsaw's airport on Nov. 1 after trouble with landing gear. No one was injured.

The last surviving Polish pilot from the Battle of Britain has died at the age of 97, says a Toronto funeral home. Turner and Porter Funeral Directors said on its website that Brig.-Gen. Tadeusz Sawicz died Oct. 19 at a nursing home in Toronto. Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza daily newspaper on Wednesday said Sawicz was the last surviving pilot among the Poles who served in Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II, and fought in the 1940 battle. He served with the RAF until early 1947. At the start of World War II in 1939, Sawicz fought in Poland's defense...

The Polish champion of freedom and liberty, founder of Solidarity, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, and first President of modern Poland Lech Walesa had been rumored to possibly be traveling to New York to stand with Occupy Wall Street protesters. Press accounts reporting this “breathless” news had given all of us pause. We suspected that the European news media had filtered out accurate information about the genesis of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). When Walesa’s comments hit the AP wire last week, my team immediately reached out to our Polish contacts. We made the point that the political themes...

Having been newly elected to the Polish Parliament, forty MPs of Janusz Palikot's movement started a new session demanding the Crucifix to be removed from the main hall of the parliament, which has already ignited a political war in Poland. (...)  Gazeta  checked out the opinion of the Polish people regarding the presence of the cross in Seym (the name of the lower chamber of the Polish Parliament) According to the poll, 70% claim  the cross should be there to stay and never removed, which is opposed by 20%. What is more, the cross in the Polish parliament is also...

Plans to increase the firepower of Europe's bail-out machinery with extra leverage threaten France's AAA rating and risk setting off a dangerous chain of events, a top German institute has warned. Berlin’s DIW institute, one of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s five official advisers, said attempts to boost the €440bn (£384bn) EFSF bail-out fund – possibly to €2 trillion – with guarantees to shore up southern Europe would be “poisonous” for France’s credit worthiness. Dr Ansgar Belke, the group’s research chief, said the leverage proposal emerging as part of the EU’s “Grand Plan” to restore confidence is self-defeating. “It counteracts efforts made...

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. "How could I not respond," Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. "The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand." A former shipyard worker who led Poland's successful revolt against Soviet communism, Walesa said "capitalism is in crisis" and not just in America. "This is a worldwide problem," he told the Lublin-based Dziennik Wschodni newspaper. "The Wall Street protesters have focused a magnifying glass...

Anti-racism groups on Friday called on European football's governing body UEFA to punish Polish club Legia Warsaw after fans brandished a "Jihad" banner during a Europa League match against Israeli side Hapoel Tel Aviv. "This is yet another case of anti-Semitic behaviour by extremist groups active in Polish football stadiums, and it could have been predicted," Rafal Pankowski of the campaign group Never Again and who runs the UEFA-backed Football Against Racism in Europe network. At the start of Thursday night's Group C home game in Warsaw - which Legia won 3-2 - a group of fans unfurled a huge...

Poland will not participate in a shameful vote over so-called Palestinian state at the United Nations on Thursday, September 22nd. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk clearly stated that Polish government will not send its representative to that meeting.

Polish Finance Minister Warns Of European War In Ten Years Adam Taylor Sep. 15, 2011, 5:05 PM Poland's Finance Minister Jasek Rostowski has warned that the breakdown of the EU could lead to war in 10 years, reports Novinite. Speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Rostowski recounted meeting with a friend who was head of a major bank: "We were talking about the crisis in eurozone. He told me 'You know, after all these political shocks, economic shocks, it is very rare indeed that in the next 10 years we could avoid a war'. A war ladies and gentlemen....

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 6, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - While surveying the landscape for inroads to push the homosexual agenda into Poland, American embassy officials under the Obama administration complained that the Catholic Church teaching is a major source of “homophobia” in the heavily Catholic country, according to private cables recently published by Wikileaks. The cables from the American embassy in Warsaw, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” were part of a dump of over 250,000 official government documents last week by Wikileaks. One cable from the American embassy in Warsaw dated August 2009 pointed to the Catholic Church as central in promoting “homophobia”...

Turkey hopes that Poland's presidency of the European Council, which began 1 July, will accelerate the country's integration into the EU. At a meeting with Polish journalists in Istanbul, thanks were made for supporting Turkey thus far, while the country's Minister of European Affairs, Egeman Bagis, underlined the question of visas as a key question at accession talks. "We are expecting a strong position from the Polish side regarding the matter of these nonsensical visas for Turkish citizens," he said. "The European Commission is in talks with Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Moldova about liberalizing the visa regime, but not with...

It's not quite real-life "Spy Kids" even though the adventure certainly is there. It seems a Polish private investigator, dubbed "Rambo" by fans, has found a solution to the problems created when social services workers in the Nordic countries take custody of children against the wishes of family members: Simply "kidnap" the kids and give them back to the parents. It's happened at least twice in Norway and is a stunning development for families there and in countries like Sweden, where social services workers, as WND has reported, have virtually absolute control over children once they are taken into government...

Memorial to commemorate the murdered unborn children erected in Poland. [Papal Hill, the outskirts of Lubon near Poznan, Poland]In the place named Papal Hill in Lubon, Poland, the local people erected a monument named "Testimony of Love" which aims at paying tribute to the murdered unborn children and bearing witness to their innate right to live in dignity.The inscription on the monument (the words in the red below)  is an excerpt taken from DEUTERONOMY, 30.19[Deuteronomy 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, [that] I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose...

The crew of the plane carrying Poland's president that crashed in Russia last year killing all 96 on board were poorly trained and ignored crucial safety regulations, a long-awaited Polish government report into the disaster said on Friday. The 328-page report, which may complicate Prime Minister Donald Tusk's bid for re-election in October, chronicles a long litany of errors and neglect by both the crew and Russian ground staff leading to the crash, which shook Poland to the core. "There were serious shortcomings in the organization of the unit (of the air force responsible for handling VIP flights)," a member...

“Poland supports actions aimed at Armenia’s membership in the European Union, and that is why it is very important to facilitate and support those decisions that will really further Armenia’s EU accession process,” Komorowski said after talks with President Serzh Sarkisian. “We are ready to share with you both negative and positive experience that we have gained during our difficult path to EU membership,” he told journalists. While declaring European integration a top foreign policy priority, Armenia has so far not expressed a desire to join the EU in the foreseeable future. The authorities in Yerevan are instead seeking to...

Poland’s finance minister says he doubts his country will adopt the euro in the next few years. With Europe’s debt crisis raising questions about the viability of the single currency, there is little enthusiasm for it in Poland.Polish leaders have repeatedly delayed a switch to the euro. Several years ago, the talk was of joining the eurozone in 2012, then leaders began to mention 2015 as a possible aim.Now Jacek Rostowski says that he can imagine Poland giving up its zloty currency during the next term of parliament that will last through 2015.The comments Friday to TOK FM radio indicate...

A reminder about the totalitarian temptationThe Washington Post’s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other. As an example of those who resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, Kennicott cited Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who had remarked on the similarities between the Empire State’s recent re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by...

Historical documents related to the capture of seven Swedes by the Gestapo in Poland in 1942 puts Sweden's subsequent ball bearing deliveries to Nazi Germany in a new light, argue historians Susanne Berger and Ingela Magner. A new review of document collections in the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) shows that the arrest of the seven "Warsaw Swedes" by the Gestapo in Poland in 1942 not only seriously jeopardized the men's lives but posed an existential threat to Swedish Match companies and other Swedish businesses throughout Eastern Europe. The men's release two years later was apparently secured not only through painstaking...