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4 The Krakow Post R E G I O N A L N E W S Latvia and Russia seal long-delayed border treaty Latvia and Russia sealed their long-delayed border treaty in a public ceremony early this week, 16 years after the Baltic state regained its independence from the Soviet Union. Latvian Foreign Minster Maris Riekstins exchanged ratification documents with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, who is on an official visit to Riga. The border accord between Latvia and its Soviet-era overlord, which had been on ice for more than a decade, had already been approved by lawmakers and the countries’ leaders. The formal exchange of documents was the final hurdle before it could come into force. Latvia broke free from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991, after five decades of Kremlin control, and completed border talks with Russia in 1997. But the draft treaty was only signed by both countries’ prime ministers in March, after being held up by differences over territory which is now in Russia but was part of independent Latvia before World War II. The spat compounded Moscow’s annoyance with Latvia for joining NATO and the EU in 2004. Latvia’s 276-kilometer (164-mile) border with Russia has since 2004 become one of the easternmost frontiers of the EU. Latvia’s neighbor Estonia, which was also ruled by Moscow until 1991, is now the only post-Communist EU member state still to fix its border with Russia, because of political differences. (AFP) Most EU states ready to sign pact with Serbia A majority of EU nations want to sign a pact on closer ties with Serbia, perhaps as soon as next month, Czech European Affairs Minister Alexandr Vonda said late last week. He said that, with the EU supporting moves by the Serbian province of Kosovo to break away, the bloc was keen to demonstrate that Belgrade has a European future to stop it from turning toward Russia. “I’m in favour of a political approach,” Vonda told reporters on the sidelines of an EU summit in Brussels. He said the EU should do its best to conclude a Stabilisation and Association Agreement “no later” than the end of January. “Our interest is to keep Kosovo under European influence ... and to keep Serbia under European influence rather than Russian influence,” he said. The only real obstacle to a signature of the accord – a first step for Balkans states to join the EU – is that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Kardzic and his war-time military chief Ratko Mladic are still at large. The two have been indicted for genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys – the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. The EU has always insisted that Serbia’s EU future depends on full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, baseed in The Hague, The Netherlands. UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, whose mandate ends at the end of the month, said this week that full cooperation meant getting Mladic, whom she says has been hiding in Serbia, behind bars. Del Ponte has been supported by The Netherlands and Belgium. But several countries, led by Italy, have been demanding that the pact be signed quickly to staunch Serbian anger as it parts with its ethnic-Albanian majority southern territory, almost certainly by May. Signing in January would provide a boost for pro-European Serbian President Boris Tadic as he confronts the nationalists in presidential elections set for Jan. 20. If Dutch objections are overcome, diplomats said that the trade and aid pact could be signed at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers on Jan. 28 in Brussels. In an interview with Le Soir newspaper in Belgium, Del Ponte expressed concern that Europe appeared to be backing away from its past tough stance on Serbia. “Serbia only cooperates when it’s under pressure and that must continue,” she said. “I am stunned by the attitude of France, Germany and Italy who want to soften their position.” “As these decisions are taken by unanimity, I’m counting on Belgium and The Netherlands,” she said. In conclusions from their summit, the EU’s leaders expressed confidence that Serbia’s “progress on the road towards the EU, including candidate status, can be accelerated.” (AFP) Ukraine parliament names pro-Western foreign minister Ukraine’s parliament named a strongly pro- Western foreign minister early this week after picking Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister. The parliament voted 227-0 for Volodymyr Ogryzko, who has been serving as deputy foreign minister and favours the ex-Soviet republic joining NATO and the EU. Opposition deputies, who oppose the NATO bid and back closer ties with Russia, boycotted the vote. Tymoshenko, who helped lead the pro-democracy Orange Revolution in 2004, earlier won the post of prime minister. The pro-Russian opposition also boycotted that vote. (AFP) P O L A N D DECEMBER 20-JANUARY 9, 2008 German town becoming Polish suburb GFDL 1.2:J23-007 Little by little, Loecknitz is being transformed into a cross-border suburb of Szczecin, as Poles go hunting for real estate bargains. agence france-presse Poland is bracing to join the Schengen passport-free zone this week, but dozens of its citizens have already helped melt the frontier by snapping up property in a small German border town. Loecknitz, a 3,000-strong community in northeast Germany, lies in the hinterland of Szcezcin, a Polish port city of some 420,000 people. Little by little, Loecknitz is being transformed into a cross-border suburb of Szczecin, as Poles go hunting for real estate the krakow post bargains. They now make up 10 percent of the population. “After joining the EU in 2004, Poles started looking for apartments and houses on the German side,” said estate agent Jan Rybski, who is himself Polish. “Loecknitz is turning back into what it was before the war,” he told AFP. Until 1945, Loecknitz was a well-heeled district of the then German city of Stettin. But the Polish-German border was shifted westwards after Germany lost World War II. Loecknitz found itself in Communist-ruled East Germany. Poland also became part of Assessments of teenage Polish students in 2006 showed that they performed best in reading tasks, while they had difficulty applying their mathematical and scientific knowledge to practical problems outside of school. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) recently published the results of tests taken by more than 400,000 15-year-olds from 58 countries around the world. The research has been carried out by PISA since 2000. It gathers information useful for projects to improve the quality of educational systems. The tests, conducted every three years, are aimed at assessing the practical skills of secondary school students in three main areas: reading comprehension, mathematical skills and scientific literacy. “In reading, Polish teenagers are above average, which is a significant improvement within the last couple of years,” Michal Fedorowicz, the manager of the PISA 2006 research team in Poland, told the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Polish students ranked 8th overall among the 58 countries. In the remaining two categories, however, the Polish did not do as well. Independent thinking by means of theoretical knowledge both in science and mathematics are their weakest points, as reflected by the 23rd and 25th-place rankings, respectively. “Our students have considerable knowledge, but they fail to use it in their own reasoning or experiment planning,” Ewa Bartnik of the PISA 2006 team told the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. She said the Polish educational system might be to blame. Practical skills in science are hardly ever required at schools, and most students don’t even have the opportunity to carry out experiments during lessons. A similar problem concerns mathematics. “Polish teenagers perform excellently as long as the task is imitative,” Fedorowicz said. The conclusion is that Polish schools fail to teach problem solving, which might cause problems when the students have to adjust to the job market in the future. the Soviet-dominated bloc, which collapsed from 1989. After East and West Germany were reunited in 1990 – bringing the ex-Communist state into the EU – the town felt the chill wind of economic crisis. Its young people left in droves to look for work in the west, investors shied away, and today around a quarter of the population is jobless. Across the border in Poland, meanwhile, the onceshambolic economy gathered steam in the 1990s, and has powered ahead since the country joined the EU. When Poland and seven other ex-Communist EU newcomers join the borderless Schengen zone from Dec. 21, it will boost Loecknitz’s existing draws for Poles. The town is only a 20-minute drive from central Szczecin, and has schools, hospitals, a gym and other leisure facilities, as well as being set in the largely unspoilt Pomerania region. Polish property hunters also get far more for their money. Real estate prices have spiralled in Poland in the past three years, but have barely changed in Loecknitz. Marek Fiuk, 30, bought a magnificent red-brick farmhouse near Loecknitz with his brother several weeks ago. The price tag: under 50,000 euro ($73,000). “For that, I’d have been able to buy a studio apartment in Szczecin, around 32-35 square meters. In other words, nothing,” he said, smiling. “Here I’ve got a whole house. I always dreamed of that.” Fiuk is also planning to set up the headquarters of his multimedia firm in his newfound home. “I travel a lot to Germany for work, and now I’m going to live there. And from Dec. 21, there won’t be any border checks. You won’t have to show your ID card, which is sometimes pretty tiresome,” he said. Maria Theresia Odentall, head of Loecknitz’s municipal housing office, said that all the homes bought by the newcomers had been on the market for years. “The Poles do these places up,” she said. Less well-off Poles also opt to rent in Loecknitz. “Three years ago, 15 percent of municipal apartments in Loecknitz were empty. Now it’s around one percent,” Odentall said. In public, the Polish influx does not appear to have caused bad feeling. “At the beginning, we had to get used to it. Now it doesn’t bother us at all,” said 83- year-old resident Anne Marie Hedwig. Nonetheless, Germany’s far-right NPD party, which is hostile to Polish migrants, won almost 21 percent of the vote in Loecknitz in regional elections last year. Secondary school students can read, not count Officers arrest 29 in child porn swoop agence france-presse Polish police detained 29 Poles on suspicion of possessing and copying child pornography via the internet, in an operation sparked by a tip-off from the EU body Europol, a spokesman told AFP late last week. “We’ve detained 29 individuals following a search of 34 apartments, private homes and businesses across the country and the seizure of 34 computers, 24 hard drives and 5,000 CDs, videos cassettes with paedophile content,” police spokesman Robert Horosz told AFP. “We took action after receiving a tip from Europol at The Hague,” Horosz said. Europol is an EU law enforcement organzation that Assessments of teenage Polish students in 2006 showed that they performed best in reading tasks, while they had difficulty applying their mathematical and scientific knowledge. handles criminal intelligence and helps to coordinate police work across the EU. Several of the suspects confessed to acquiring child pornography over the internet during police questioning, he said. In March of this year Polish police detained 33 suspects in a crackdown against an internet paedophile ring. Police have detained 29 Poles on suspicion of child pornography. GDFL 1.2:Nevit Dilmen
DECEMBER 20-JANUARY 9, 2008 P O L A N D The Krakow Post 5 Cave-in kills two in copper mine agence france-presse Two miners perished and five were injured in a cave-in in a Polish copper mine in Rudna, southwest Poland, mine officials in Katowice said late last week. The cave-in occurred 1,050 meters (3,445 feet) underground following a seismic jolt. A 33-year-old miner was killed instantly while rescuers found the body of the second victim, mine official Edyta Tomaszewska told the Polish Press Agency (PAP). Five miners were hospitalised with light injuries while 22 others were able to escape the danger zone unscathed, Tomaszewska said. One miner was killed and a further three injured in a similar cave-in in February in the same copper mine owned by Poland’s KGHM mining conglomerate. Poland’s worst mine disaster in 30 years occurred in November 2006 in the Halemba coal mine in the southern Silesian coal basin. Twenty-three miners were killed in a methane explosion. New bird flu outbreak at farm agence france-presse Poland has been hit by a fresh outbreak of bird flu, authorities told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) early this week, with the deadly H5N1 virus confirmed at a small northern poultry farm. Infected birds were discovered at a small farm near Milakowo in the northern region of Ostrada, PAP quoted veterinary service spokesman Adam Wojtaszek was quoted as saying. Infected poultry had also been discovered last week in two other small farms in the same region. Five other outbreaks of the strain, which can also be fatal to humans, have been discovered since the beginning of this month at larger chicken and turkey farms in central and northern Poland. Polish authorities have slapped security zones around the affected farms. Last week, a stork and two buzzards which were being cared for at a bird sanctuary in Poland’s northwestern lake region of Mazuria were also found to have died from H5N1. Poland was also hit by the virus last year, but it only affected wild birds, and this year’s outbreaks are the first among poultry. Since the latest outbreak began, veterinary authorities have as a precaution ordered the slaughter of around half a mln domestic fowl. Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki has warned that the outbreak must be brought under control because it could cause major economic problems given that the affected areas have a high concentration of poultry farms. Sawicki has promised farmers 100 percent compensation for their losses. The European Commission has since Dec. 3 banned exports of live poultry, meat and eggs from the affected areas. Poland’s fellow EU member and neighbor Lithuania has imposed a blanket ban on Polish poultry products, a step likewise taken by Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Gravediggers are to be taught proper language the krakow post agence france-presse Prime Minister Donald Tusk judged “unacceptable” late last week a warning by Russia’s army head of a possible retaliation if U.S. interceptor missiles planned for deployment in Poland are ever used. “This kind of declaration is unacceptable. No declaration of this kind will influence Polish-American negotiations” on U.S. plans to site 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, Tusk said in an interview with Poland’s private TVN television channel. The U.S. has also outlined plans for a radar base in the Czech Republic. Under Washington’s schedule, both would be up and running by 2012 as part of a missile defense shield aimed, the U.S. administration says, against a possible missile threat from rogue states such as Iran. In modern language, slang expressions are abundant. Slang can enhance the sense of belonging to a group, while at the same time it makes the language more vivid. Its use rarely causes problems, except in some particular cases, as has lately become evident to Polish gravediggers. The language used by Polish cemetery workers leaves much to be desired, according to research carried out by Monika Mroz, a young lawyer. In her master’s thesis, she studied the use of expressions concerning death and the dead by this professional group. Her findings are alarming to the undertakers and cemetery owners. Given the data collected by the young researcher, one can no longer be surprised at the large number of complaints issued by bereaved family members about gravediggers’ language. Loosely translated, a “pendant” means the corpse of a hanged man, a “buoy” the body of a drowned one. “Oak overcoat,” “box” and “pencil case” all denote a coffin. Colorful as it is, the gravedigger’s tongue can be extremely offensive to the friends and relations of the deceased. “When I heard my cousin being referred to as a ‘stiff biscuit,’ I just couldn’t help bursting into tears,” Teresa Janik, a shop assistant from Poznan, told the newspaper Dziennik Lodzki. She, like many other offended families, complained to the owner of the funeral parlor. The numerous complaints resulted in the undertakers’ decision to provide gravediggers with special training on the proper use of language while at work. The task has been entrusted to the care of a renowned linguist, professor Jerzy Bralczyk. “The problem is that although words such as ‘corpse’ are so common to the people in our business, they sound demeaning to the families who suffer the loss of a beloved husband or mother,” said Tomasz Salski, chairman of the Polish Cremation Association of Cemetery Administrators and Funeral Directors. “We therefore should do our best to be most considerate and tactful.” Professor Bralczykis faces a challenge. Polish language does not abound in expressions concerning eternal matters. Still, he is enthusiastic about the undertakers’ endeavor. “It is admirable that they want to improve,” the linguist said. “In the situations they have to face on a daily basis, even neutral words acquire a trace of cruelty. The most vital thing is to refer to the dead as ‘people,’ thus stressing their humanity.” The training for cemetery workers will be in the form of lectures and workshops. Professor Bralczykis will visit several cities, teaching a total of 3,000 to 5,000 people. Russian missile unacceptable Russia has strongly objected to the plans, considering them a threat to its security. On Saturday, Russia’s army chief of staff Yury Baluyevsky suggested that a “mistaken classification of an interceptor missile launch” could trigger a retaliatory strike from Moscow, whose security systems might misinterpret it as being aimed at Russia. “When I heard the words of the Russian general on an automatic reaction, I was reminded of the worst period” of the Communist era, Tusk said. Baluyevsky’s remarks also triggered a sharp reaction from the Czech Foreign Ministry which described his language as “unimaginable in the democratic world.” But Tusk also said Warsaw wanted to talk about the missile shield with all parties concerned, including Russia. 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Traditional feast held in city center for haves and have ... - Krakow Post

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