Poland in the news...

From the Gulf Times:

Gunmen launched simultaneous mortar and machinegun attacks on two mainly Polish military bases in southern Iraq yesterday, after Shia militants vowed to step up pressure on Polish soldiers to force them out.
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Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has vowed to keep Polish troops in southern Iraq despite the attack on the ambassador earlier this month.

The ambassador was wounded in a triple bomb attack on his diplomatic convoy in Baghdad in which one Polish secret service officer and a passerby were killed. Five days later a car bomb killed two people near Poland’s Baghdad embassy.

Yesterday’s attacks come days ahead of an October 21 parliamentary election in Poland in which Kaczynski, a strong US ally, faces a challenge from opposition parties who want to pull Polish troops out of Iraq.

From the Chronicle Journals:

Poland’s main opposition leader castigated a popular ex-president in a debate Monday, accusing him of hurting the country in his past role as a communist leader and of allowing corruption to flourish in democratic times.

"You built communism and that heritage is hurting Poland very much," Donald Tusk, the head of the pro-business Civic Platform party told Aleksander Kwasniewski in the third and final televised debate before parliamentary elections Sunday.

"Throughout your entire life as an adult, you were building socialism in Poland: whether before 1989 - we all know well in which party - and as president, for 10 years," Tusk told him. "This is why it is so hard for the Poles to free themselves and to gain economic sovereignty."

From Catholic News Service:

Poland's Catholic bishops have urged support for candidates who uphold Catholic teaching in an upcoming parliamentary election, in which the party of the country's president and prime minister face possible defeat.

"We ask all lay faithful and clergy in our country and beyond its borders to pray for the homeland and participate in large numbers," the Warsaw-based bishops' conference said in a pastoral letter. "But we also need to vote properly, which means in accordance with moral conviction. Believers should give their vote to people whose attitude and views are close, or at least not opposed, to the Catholic faith and Catholic values."

Poland Iraq militant attack elections skew elections war on terror