Bite sized root vegetables when I am too tired to write longer stories.
Top story for days here has been Edward Mazur’s arrest in the US in connection with the murder, eight years ago, of ex-police Chief Marek Papala in Warsaw. Poland has applied for his extradition from Chicago.
He’s being charged with ordering the murder in a mafia, hit man style killing of someone who simply ‘knew too much’…
Mazur’s lawyers are saying this is a politically motivated move, due to his connections with the ex-communist SLD. The government is using the (outrageous) murder to underline the alleged corruption at the heart of the Third Republic. They think the order for the murder came from within the then SLD Interior Ministry.
Problem is, Mazur has joint US/Polish citizenship.
the meaning of life
The League of Polish Families, a particularly busy party at this time of the year, is calling for the Abortion Law - which currently only allows for terminations when the health (sometimes) or life of the mother is at risk, or when the pregnancy was the result of a rape, etc - to be repealed.
LPR wants women who have been raped to have the kid anyway. They are also calling for a change in the constitution to guarantee the right to life of a fetes from the moment of conception.
The majority party PiS seems to be for leaving things as they are.
I hope Poland doesn’t ‘duck’ out of this debate. It literally involves ‘the meaning of life’ and the rights of women over their own bodies.
Portugal is having a referendum soon, maybe Poland should too?
next stop, maternity ward
Though ‘95% Catholic’ Poland has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, babies are still been born here. But not usually on public transport.
Sulafa Ismail from Sudan, gave birth to a daughter in the middle of the rush hour this morning. The Mayor of Warsaw visited the mother and Duha (meaning ‘Light’) later in hospital.
When I first heard this story I just hoped Sulfara had bought an extra ticket for Duha. If you get caught without one it’s an 80 zloty fine (but many get away paying less).
It turns out that the tram company has offered the mum free travel on their sometimes rickety trams for life and all her (six) kids free travel till they are 18.
That’s quite a lot of tickets.
Expect in the coming months many more babies being born on public transport. It’s an earner!
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Baby beats
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19 comments:
Another abortion debate. Gee, that sounds almost as fun as doing a documentary about stingrays off the coast of Australia...
Another abortion debate. Gee, that sounds almost as fun as doing a documentary about stingrays off the coast of Australia...
Agreed. It's not my favourite subject either. But Poland needs to get this kind of thing settled.
rizzleweb...I'll ckeck out your site this evening.
But you left out the really really big story about the classroom assault/acted out gang rape and resultant suicide of the girl in Gdansk.
Then again, such stuff does lend to speechlessness.
Think PiS et al with find someone in authority at the school with a left background to blame for the trajedy?
I didn't know what to say about it, Geezer. Bullying. Lack of discipline at school. Teenage suicide.
What else is there to say apart from that it is very sad.
Why the debate about abortion? If you are against abortion then don't have one. Pretty simple really.
Life begins when a being can live for itself when it is provided with the very best of modern medicine. Until that point the ball of cells is a parasite sucking the life from a living being. Which does tend to explain why the members of the LPR and Catholic church indentify so strongly with the things.
Why the debate about abortion? If you are against abortion then don't have one. Pretty simple really.
First of all, I don’t think you will find many people who are ‘pro abortion’. You will find many people however who are ‘pro-choice’.
A debate about abortion in Poland should not be anything to be afraid of. Debating all issues is important, and this, in Poland, is one of the most important ones.
If you look at opinion polls then the country is split pretty much 50-50. So this is an issue that should be debated straight away and I am glad that it has been brought up again.
The issue raises crucial questions as what is a ‘life’ – and you raise one definition of that. It also raises the issue of self-determination, an issue which has become debased in the West recently. The liberal-left continually bring this up. Smoking cigarettes, 'binge drinking', what food we eat, etc etc etc are seen as areas in which the state has the right to intervene. This plays into the hands of those conservatives who want to restrict women’s rights over their own bodies. The body is now an area which can be colonized by the state. And we can't just blame conservatives for that one.
That’s why I think we should have a referendum about the issue in Poland. Let’s not be scared of a debate.
The sad events with the schoolgirl in Gdansk could have occurred anywhere, bullying, schoolyard violence and teenage suicide occur in all societies.
Mr. Mazur could become useful to the process of dealing with the deeply entrenched criminal gangs, if indeed he is returned to Poland and successfully prosecuted. It would be of great service to Poland to give him his freedom in exchange for a public and total disclosure of the criminal networks he was allegedly involved in. These criminal networks usually consist of the criminal gangs, former SB personnel and former communist officials that seamlessly slipped into the business community. This “super mafia” was a marriage of convenience during the 90’s; the criminal gangs were always around and could supply any item imaginable item during the communist era. Mr. Mazur’s immediate concern has to be avoiding return to Poland, knowing too much could cause a health problem.
The birth control issue in Poland continues along the same nutty way it does in the US except pro-choice is out gunned in Poland because politicians are too scared to take on the church. I suspect pro-choice is what women want in Poland but won’t openly support it because of a fear of being stigmatized in the community. It would be a wise political move to go to a referendum on this issue. The current leadership will pay dearly in the polling booth for passing a strict anti-abortion bill.
Perhaps a future topic for this blog, look at the panicked and irrational behaviour of Cardinal Glemp on the issue priests cooperating with the SB, it seems there’s a hell of story yet to be told.
The Red Priests is definatly a good one and I promise to do it next week. There is many layers to that story...
Just a further comment on Red Priests, it’s reasonable to believe that virtually no priest volunteered to work the SB. The SB had a method of recruiting informer in any area of society by the use of blackmail. We should remember that virtually all priests were under police surveillance to some extent. In the process if there were any “inappropriate sexual behaviours” observed that would become the lever of control.
If you think the church in Poland is fundamentally political (as I do) it's not out of bounds to assume that the hierarchy encouraged some priests to act as pseudo-informers giving harmless or misleading information.
If that's the case then they should just say so,why is Glemp all most histerical with people inside the church looking into this?
It clashes too much with the public image. It wouldn't be the first time Realpolitik has clashed with PR and it wouldn't be the last.
Another possible explanation for Cardinal Glemp's behaviour: he has been nicknamed Cardinal Gump
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