Same old Globe:
"Polish party wants cross out of Parliament" November 10, 2011|Associated Press
WARSAW - A new left-wing party in Poland yesterday demanded the removal of a crucifix that hangs in Parliament, a move seen by many citizens in the mainly Roman Catholic country as a provocative challenge to a cherished symbol.
The party, Palikot’s Movement, filed its request with the new parliamentary speaker, Ewa Kopacz. It argues the crucifix violates a constitutional guarantee of a secular state.
Related: Globe's Polish Political Joke
Not funny.
It is the party’s first such appeal since the newly elected Parliament held its first sitting Tuesday and follows a similar appeal made last month that went unanswered.
“Poland is a lay country, and its public authorities, including the Legislature, should maintain impartiality on matters of religious and philosophical convictions,’’ the party said.
Led by maverick businessman-turned-politician Janusz Palikot, the party unexpectedly emerged as the third political force in Oct. 9 elections. It advocates curbing the influence of the church, simplifying laws, and cutting down on bureaucracy.
It also supports gay rights, and two of its members made history by becoming the first transsexual and openly gay person to be elected as lawmakers.
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"In Poland, a more diverse Parliament" November 09, 2011|Associated Press
WARSAW - A transsexual woman and an openly gay man took seats in Poland’s newly elected Parliament yesterday, 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.
Grodzka sat next to Robert Biedron, an activist who is the first openly gay person elected to Poland’s Parliament. Both belong to Palikot’s Movement, a new progressive party that became the third-largest party in Parliament in the Oct. 9 election....
Palikot’s Movement, led by outspoken entrepreneur-turned-politician Janusz Palikot, has vowed to push for liberal causes. It opposes the influence of the church in political life, promotes gay rights, and wants to challenge the country’s near-total ban on abortion.
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"Pilot rejects hero status after landing" November 03, 2011|By Monika Scislowska and Vanessa Gera, Associated Press
WARSAW - The Polish pilot hailed for landing a Boeing 767 jetliner on its belly after its landing gear failed stepped into the public eye yesterday looking stiff and uncomfortable, and insisted that all the talk of heroism is exaggerated.
Captain Tadeusz Wrona set the jetliner down so gently that many of the 231 people on board thought it had landed on its wheels - until they saw fire, sparks, and smoke rising from beneath the aircraft as it slid down the Warsaw airport runway.
The 54-year-old pilot for the Polish national carrier LOT deflected the praise, saying he merely did what he was trained to do.
“We knew we could make no mistake and that the contact with the ground should not be hard,’’ Wrona said at a news conference in Warsaw.
In the United States, video of Wrona’s landing Tuesday immediately evoked memories of the “miracle on the Hudson,’’ when Captain Chesley “Sully’’ Sullenberger landed a crippled US Airways jet in the Hudson River in 2009 and saved 155 lives.
His voice shaking at times as he struggled for words, Wrona said he felt a huge relief when he knew everyone aboard the flight from Newark, N.J., had reached safety - and he wondered whether he might have executed the landing even more effectively....
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"European rabbis convene in Poland; Largest gathering of Jewish leaders there since WWII" November 02, 2011|By Vanessa Gera, Associated Press
WARSAW - Dozens of rabbis from across Europe have gathered in Warsaw for the largest meeting of Jewish religious leaders in Poland since the community was virtually wiped out during World War II.
This year’s Conference of European Rabbis will focus on a range of issues affecting European and global Jewry, including attempts in Europe to ban the Jewish method of religious slaughter of animals.
The rabbis will also discuss the problem of validating the Jewish identity of people who have not practiced Judaism in two or three generations. This has become an issue in countries like Poland, where many people with Jewish ancestry were so traumatized by the Holocaust and postwar anti-Semitism that they lived secular or Christian lives for decades and are only now embracing a Jewish life again.
Over the last 30 years, the Jewish population in Poland has grown from just a few thousand to more than 20,000, the conference said.
Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, called the three-day gathering of about 150 rabbis “a real testament to the revival of Jewish life in Poland.’’
The meeting began Monday, when several of the representatives met with President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland. Today, the rabbis are to meet with Polish “righteous gentiles’’ - Christians who risked their lives to save Jews during the war.
The meeting comes after Dutch Parliament passed a bill banning the slaughter of livestock without stunning it first, removing an exemption that has allowed Jews and Muslims to butcher animals according to their centuries-old dietary rules. The bill must still pass the Senate.
It would be the second country after New Zealand to do so in recent years, joining Switzerland, and the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, whose bans are mostly traceable to pre-World War II anti-Semitism.
If you don't let them kill the animal the way they want they holler anti-Semitism?
“This has become an issue of the utmost concern to European Jewry,’’ the Conference of European rabbis said in a statement, noting the Dutch vote and criticism from activists at the European parliament.
Since overthrowing communism in 1989, Poland has evolved into a thriving democracy, and those with Jewish roots feel increasingly secure about living openly as Jews again - at least in the cities....
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Not to be insensitive about, but I'm tired of the poor, persecuted Jew thing.
"Poland takes new look at Nazi crimes; Investigators had been stymied by Iron Curtain" October 28, 2011|By Vanessa Gera, Associated Press
WARSAW - Polish authorities have reopened an investigation into World War II crimes committed at Auschwitz and its satellite camps, an inquiry that was closed in the 1980s because of the country’s isolation behind the Iron Curtain.
Not to be insensitive, but I'd like to know when war crimes are going to brought up for CRIMES that have OCCURRED over say the LAST TEN YEARS or so -- or do we have to wait 70-something years for Bush, Bliar, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al, to face trial?
How about the crop of Zionist Israeli war criminals in charge over there? Any indictments coming down?
One aim of the new investigation is to track down any living Nazi perpetrators, according to an announcement yesterday by the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that looks into Nazi and communist-era crimes.
Nazi Germany opened Auschwitz in 1940, months after it invaded and occupied Poland. Over the next five years of war, German and Austrian Nazis murdered up to 1.5 million people there at the expanded Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, most of them Jews from across Europe, but also Poles, Roma, gays, and others.
The investigation was opened by a branch of the remembrance institute in Krakow, near Auschwitz. Germany operated other death camps in Poland - including Chelmno, Treblinka, and Belzec - and it was not clear whether new investigations into them are planned.
I don't want to argue about history today.
A leading international Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, praised Poland’s reopening of the investigation. He said it could have tremendous implications in paving the way for new prosecutions thanks to the precedent set by the conviction of Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk in Germany earlier this year.
Demjanjuk was convicted of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder. It was the first time Germany convicted someone as a Nazi camp guard based on the theory that if he worked there, he was part of the extermination process, even without direct proof of any specific killings.
A CONVICTION based on NO EVIDENCE but just a THEORY!
Well, I must say that CERTAINLY OPENS THINGS UP to charge LYING, MASS-MURDERING, WAR-CRIMINAL LEADERS and their MOUTHPIECE MEDIA PRESSTITUTES!
That has opened the door to many more possible prosecutions, and German authorities have since reopened hundreds of previously dormant investigations of Nazi death camp guards - men so old that time is running out for prosecutors....
I suppose it's an easy appeasement of Israel so they don't detonate a nuke in Berlin.
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Related: Germany Long Ago
Maybe that's why agenda-pushing papers are failing: stuck in the past.
Also see: THE HOLOCAUST and the FOUR MILLION VARIANT
Holocaust is Nothing But A HoloHoax
How One American Evolved into a "Holocaust Denier"
It was a very painful transformation, readers. Realizing you have been lied to all your life is.
