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☆ Poland slams vote questioning Hungary holding EU presidency
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

WARSAW, June 1 (Reuters) - Poland rebuked on Thursday the European Parliament backing a resolution that questions Hungary's ability to hold the European Union presidency next year due to concerns about judicial independence. According to a calendar agreed by all EU governments in 2016, Hungary is to hold the presidency of the bloc between July and December 2024. Hungary and Poland have long been at odds with the EU over multiple issues, such as the rule of law, media freedoms and LGBTQ rights. The EU has frozen billions of euros in funds for Budapest and Warsaw due to its concerns. Hungary has refused to provide any military equipment to its neighbour to help it fight off a Russian invasion, and Hungary has criticised EU sanctions against Moscow.

Persons: Mateusz Morawiecki, Viktor Orban's, Balazs Orban, Alan Charlish, Anna Wlodarczak, Lisa Shumaker Organizations: WARSAW, Parliament, Union, EU, European Union, European Commission, . State Department, Twitter, Moscow, Thomson Locations: Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Brussels, Moldova, Budapest, Warsaw

But some researchers and environmental groups - supported by companies claiming to be able to help solve the problem - say airlines have done too little to handle the issue. According to such experts, research shows that non-CO2 emissions can actually be more harmful than carbon emissions. New European Union rules on emissions trading that will come into force in 2025 will force airlines to track and report their non-C02 emissions. Airlines have pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, mainly by adopting Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), scarce alternative fuels made from renewable sources - like biofuels or synthetic fuels - that are used to power aircraft. Based in Cambridge, England, SATAVIA says that by focusing so heavily on carbon emissions, the industry will be paying more money for a solution that could take years to have an impact.

Persons: Roger Teoh, SATAVIA, Adam Durant, Padraic Halpin, Tim Hepher, Aurora Ellis Organizations: International Air Transport Association, Imperial College London, New, Union, Airlines, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, Reuters, Thomson Locations: Istanbul, Paris, contrails, Cambridge, England

☆ A.I. poses human extinction risk on par with nuclear war, Sam Altman and other tech leaders warn
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Sheila Chiang | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

The Microsoft Bing App is seen running on an iPhone in this photo illustration on 30 May, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Artificial intelligence may lead to human extinction and reducing the risks associated with the technology should be a global priority, industry experts and tech leaders stated in an open letter. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the statement on Tuesday read. The technology has gathered pace in recent months after chatbot ChatGPT was released for public use in November and subsequently went viral. The statement Tuesday said that there has been increasing discussion about a "broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI."

Persons: Microsoft Bing, Jaap Arriens, Sam Altman, chatbot ChatGPT, ChatGPT Organizations: Microsoft, Getty, Google, Center, AI Safety Locations: Warsaw, Poland

☆ EU, US concerned about Polish law that could ban people from public office
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

BRUSSELS/WARSAW, May 30 (Reuters) - The European Commission and U.S. State Department have expressed concern about a new Polish law they say could effectively ban individuals deemed to have acted under Russian influence from holding public office without providing proper judicial review. The law, which Poland's president on Monday said he would sign into law, was developed by the eurosceptic and nationalist ruling PiS party ahead of parliamentary elections due in October or November. Poland's foreign ministry rejected the criticism, saying the law provided for "due process in a fair procedure". "We have a special concern now about the situation in Poland with the creation by law of a special committee able to deprive citizens, individuals, from their right to be elected to public office," EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said. Any party subject to the commission's decision will have the right to appeal in an administrative court, the ministry said.

South Korean companies do not disclose the unit prices for their weapons, which are often sold with support vehicles and spare parts. That will include building South Korean arms on license in Poland, officials in Seoul and Warsaw said. "It may work for some countries at very, very low volume," he added of Polish-brokered South Korean weapons sales, discussing challenges the joint operation might face. The 2022 arms deal began with South Korean companies signing a framework agreement with the Polish government. Seoul has since approved at least some South Korean weapons components for use in Ukraine.

☆ Polish president signs 'Tusk Law' on undue Russian influence
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Opposition figures have nicknamed it Lex Tusk, using the Latin word for law. "In a normal democratic country, somebody who is president of that country would never sign such a Stalin-esque law," PO lawmaker Marcin Kierwinski told private broadcaster TVN 24. CONCERNSThe Polish Judges' Association Iustitia said the law breached European Union values and could prompt more punitive EU measures over democratic backsliding in Poland. Poland's dependence on Russian energy has progressively declined, even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The construction of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal, allowing the import of non-Russian gas, started when Tusk was in power.

☆ Analysis: China says it wants peace in Ukraine, but is it only on Russia's terms?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( Simone Mccarthy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

But Li’s trip has also laid bare the divisions between China and Europe when it comes to how peace can be reached — and served to underline Beijing’s close alignment with Moscow. As such, that’s “not on the table for China,” Tsang said. That stance has horrified much of Europe, and Li’s tour comes as China has been attempting to repair relations there. “No one will do anything against us behind Ukraine’s back, because we have built trusting relationships with all our key partners,” he added. “The crucial question is what message from Europe — Kyiv, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and Brussels — Li will deliver in Moscow and Beijing,” he said.

☆ Polish president to sign Russian influence bill despite opposition protests
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

WARSAW, May 29 (Reuters) - Poland's president said on Monday he would sign off on a bill authorising a panel to investigate Russian influence despite opposition criticism it is witch hunt against government opponents in an election year. Opposition figures call a bill to set up an investigative commission the "Lex Tusk", using the Latin term for "law". PO lawmaker Marcin Kierwinski condemned Duda's decision to sign the bill. "In a normal democratic country, somebody who is president of that country would never sign such a Stalin-esque law," he told private broadcaster TVN 24. Reporting by Alan Charlish, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Anna Koper; editing by Robert BirselOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Poland to raise minimum wage twice in 2024, minister says
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WARSAW, May 27 (Reuters) - Poland plans to raise the minimum wage twice in 2024 to help people cope with high inflation, Family and Social Policy Minister Marlena Malag said, as the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party prepares for a parliamentary election later this year. "The minimum wage next year will be above 4,200 zlotys ($1,015)," Malag was quoted as saying by state-controlled news agency PAP. She said that, like in 2023, next year the minimum wage will be raised in two steps - from Jan. 1 and July 1. The minimum wage was raised to 3,490 zlotys from January 2023 and will be lifted to 3,600 zlotys from July. ($1 = 4.1422 zlotys)Reporting by Anna Koper; Editing by Alison WilliamsOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (EBACE), hosted in Geneva, kicks off on Tuesday and brings together everyone from brokers, planemakers to engine producers. CO2 emissions from private jets in Europe grew by 31% between 2005 and 2019, according to environmental group Transport and Environment. Protesters are expected to gather on Tuesday outside the conference location in Geneva to highlight the rising number of private jet flights amidst a worsening global climate crisis. "The big innovations are usually deployed first in our industry," Kok said. Business jet flights have dropped in Europe by around 6% compared with the same time in 2022, WINGX data showed.

☆ Russian parliament chief proposes Polish truck ban, says Warsaw owes Moscow billions
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

MOSCOW, May 21 (Reuters) - Russia's top lawmaker on Sunday called for a ban on Polish trucks transiting Russian territory and for Poland to compensate Moscow financially for what he said was the Soviet rebuilding of the east European country after World War Two. He said Poland should also hand back territory it received after the war. Volodin said a parliamentary committee would begin considering a ban on Polish trucks entering Russian territory as soon as Monday. Strained Russian-Polish relations have deteriorated further since the war in Ukraine - something Moscow calls "a special military operation" with Warsaw positioning itself as one of Kyiv's key allies. In March 2022, Poland said it was expelling 45 Russian diplomats suspected of working for Moscow's intelligence services.

☆ Ukrainian firms venture abroad for growth as war hits home
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Olena Harmash | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +6 min

The ongoing conflict has prompted several Ukrainian firms to focus abroad to reduce their reliance on a shrinking home market and to tap into the millions of people who have left. Ukraine, which had a pre-war population of about 40 million, has seen its domestic economy turned upside down, with corporate investments and growth now rare. "Our choice was to go to Poland, mainly because Poland hosts now the highest number of Ukrainians who fled from the war." In September, 8.5% of all companies opened in Poland had Ukrainian capital, compared with 0.8% in January 2022. "The main goal is to grow abroad much faster than we planned for ourselves in the pre-war period," Vovk said.

☆ Investing in Space: Is SpaceX's Starlink growing satellite internet market share, or taking it?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Michael Sheetz | In Michaeljsheetz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

CNBC's Investing in Space newsletter offers a view into the business of space exploration and privatization, delivered straight to your inbox. Just over two and a half years after SpaceX's Starlink first rolled out its beta service, the satellite internet company now has more than 1.5 million subscribers. Starlink "introduced a service that leapfrogs the capability, although not quite the cost," of existing satellite and terrestrial competitors. Brazil, he noted, is the most dramatic example of Starlink taking share from incumbent satellite providers, where Starlink has added nearly the same amount of customers that Hughes has lost. With Starlink going after nearly every market vertical – from consumers to governments and everything in between – Prokosh noted customers are often just adding Starlink to existing options.

☆ Polish news websites hit by DDoS attacks
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WARSAW, May 18 (Reuters) - Several Polish news websites were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that the government said could be the action of Russian hacking groups, the digitalisation minister was quoted as saying on Thursday. DDoS attacks work by directing high volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid to knock them offline. Asked whether Russian groups were behind the attacks, Cieszynski said "we have such information". According to PAP, the websites affected included those of daily newspapers Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Super Express. Reporting by Alan Charlish and Karol Badohal; Editing by Alex RichardsonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Japan Is America’s Most Essential Ally - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Jennifer Lind | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ever since World War II ended, Japan has been passing the buck. Sheltered by the postwar U.S. security alliance, Japan provided bases for American forces but kept its own military spending remarkably low for a country of its size and wealth, resisting American urging to share more of the burden. But Japan is the linchpin of today’s paramount geopolitical competition — China’s push for regional dominance of East Asia — and it is America’s most essential ally. for decades), and a Japanese public still traumatized by defeat in World War II. It also reassured Asian nations that Japan would not again embark on overseas aggression.

☆ NATO reaches back to Cold War past with first major defence plans in decades
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Sabine Siebold | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

[1/6] The Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer listens during an interview in Tallinn, Estonia September 16, 2022. By outlining what it calls its regional plans, NATO will also give nations guidance on how to upgrade their forces and logistics. Finland's accession last month has alone doubled NATO's border with Russia to some 2,500 km, forcing a more flexible approach to deployments than in the past, when Germany was seen as the main battlezone. "We don't envision the type of war that the Cold War was, where allied forces ... would be hit simultaneous with large-scale Warsaw Pact attacks," he said, pointing rather to regionalised conflicts that needed to be contained by quick force deployments. NATO agreed in 2022 to put 300,000 troops on high alert, up from 40,000 in the past.

☆ NATO reaches back to Cold War past with first major defense plans
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Sabine Siebold | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

☆ Czechs cancel Soviet-era decrees giving Russian embassy free land
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

PRAGUE, May 17 (Reuters) - The Czech government on Wednesday cancelled Soviet-era decrees that granted the Russian embassy free use of land in Prague and other cities, a further step in a more than two-year diplomatic spat with Moscow worsened by the war in Ukraine. The Russian embassy in Prague did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Russia will now have to pay leases to use of the land, the foreign ministry said. Prague has been a strong supporter of Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 2022 and has supplied it with military aid. The Czech parliament designated "the current Russian regime as terrorist" in November.

☆ Opinion: How will Russia’s war end? Zelensky’s representative in the US has an unflinching view
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( David A. Andelman | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +17 min

Ukraine's ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, greets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he arrives in Washington on December 21, 2022. From the start, our president has been very vocal, saying that we need to liberate Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders. We heard it also from our strategic partners here, and even at the recent phone call of our president with President Xi. Andelman: So why did President Zelensky recently have a long conversation with Xi Jinping? Andelman: You know President Zelensky very well personally.

☆ Two rare, unknown Rembrandt portraits worth millions discovered in private collection
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-15 | by ( Lianne Kolirin | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

London CNN —A pair of unknown and “exceptionally rare” portraits by Rembrandt have been discovered in a private collection in the UK. Signed and dated 1635, the pictures are of an elderly husband and wife who were related to Rembrandt by marriage. In 1635, the year the portraits were painted, the subjects acquired a garden next to that of Rembrandt’s mother in Leiden. They then traveled to Warsaw, to the private collection of Count Vincent Potocki, before briefly entering the collection of Baron d’Ivry in Paris in 1820 and then James Murray, 1st Baron Glenlyon. They had never appeared in any of the Rembrandt literature of the 19th or 20h century, so they were completely unknown,” said Pettifer.

☆ Russia says European armed forces treaty contrary to its security interests
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

May 15 (Reuters) - The European armed forces treaty from which Moscow is to withdraw is contrary to Russia's security interests, Russia's envoy in charge of the withdrawal said in remarks published early on Monday. Russia's parliament is to decide on Monday when to formally denounce the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), following President Vladimir Putin's decree on May 10. "The CFE Treaty, due to the changed situation, is contrary to our security interests. Ryabkov was appointed last week to represent Putin during parliamentary proceedings on denouncing the treaty, which aimed to regulate the number of forces deployed by Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. Russia announced in 2015 that it was completely halting its participation in the treaty.

☆ Poland to ramp up child benefit payments from 2024
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WARSAW, May 14 (Reuters) - The Polish government will increase monthly child benefit payments to 800 zlotys ($193.13) per child from 500 zlotys from the start of 2024, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said on Sunday. The family support program called "Family 500 plus" is a flagship project of the Law and Justice party (PiS), which was introduced in 2016. "... from the new year, 500 plus will be 800 plus," Kaczynski told a convention before parliamentary elections due this autumn. Child benefit payments currently cost the state budget over 40 billion zlotys a year. The next election convention of the Law and Justice party is to be held in June.

☆ Poland says object likely to be observation balloon entered airspace from east
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-13 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WARSAW, May 13 (Reuters) - An unidentified object that entered Polish airspace from the direction of Belarus was probably an observation balloon, Poland's defence ministry said on Saturday on Twitter. NATO-member Poland is on alert for infractions of its airspace as war rages in neighbouring Ukraine after incidents in November and December in which missiles landed on its territory. Captain Ewa Zlotnicka, press officer of the Armed Forces Operational Command, told broadcaster TVN 24 the object entered Polish airspace on Friday evening. The ministry said radar contact with it was lost near Rypin, a town in north-central Poland. (This story has been refiled to clarify that the missile found in April was not the one fired in November, in paragraph 6.)

☆ How Russians end up in a far-right militia fighting in Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-11 | by ( Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +9 min

[1/3] Danil Yugoslavsky gets ready at Civic Council’s Warsaw office, hours before crossing into Ukraine, in Warsaw, Poland, January 15, 2023. Max Smit, who crossed into Ukraine with Yugoslavsky, had never held a weapon before he joined the RVC. And there are some who think that fighting for the motherland is their cause," said Galeotti, naming the Rusich Group and ENOT Corp among far-right paramilitary units fighting on Russia's side. That's still a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and volunteers fighting in Ukraine, and the thousands of foreigners that have been fighting Russian forces there. According to Sokolov, RVC fighters received regular salaries from the Ukrainian defence ministry.

☆ Military object found in Polish forest was Russian missile - media
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WARSAW, May 10 (Reuters) - The military object found in a Polish forest in April was a Russian CH-55 missile, Polish private media outlets RMF FM and Polsat News reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources. The area where the object was found is hundreds of kilometres from Poland's borders with Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Private broadcaster RMF FM reported on Wednesday without naming its sources that the preliminary findings of Poland's Air Force Institute of Technology was that the object was a Russian CH-55 missile. Private broadcaster Polsat News also reported without naming its sources that the object was a CH-55 missile. A Polish government spokesman and the Air Force Institute of Technology could not immediately be reached for comment.

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