Eideard

Europe’s new Vega rocket has completed a flawless first flight.

Controllers at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana ignited the rocket at 07:00 local time (10:00 GMT), and it completed its mission 70 minutes later…

For its first outing, Vega placed nine payloads in orbit, including a physics experiment to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity…

The vehicle is intended to guarantee access to space for an increasingly important class of satellite weighing less than 2.5 tonnes. At the moment, these smaller spacecraft, which include many Earth observation satellites, tend to ride converted Russian nuclear missiles to get into orbit. European operators can sometimes wait many months to get a launch slot on these ICBMs, however.

Vega should allow them to have more control over the schedules of their space projects. It also means that the value of what it is an immensely high-tech enterprise will return to the European economy, not to foreign industry…

Monday’s mission was intended to qualify the overall Vega system, including the rocket vehicle itself and all its ground infrastructure and operations systems.

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An ultra-liberal party that surged from nowhere to third place in Poland’s election plans to shake up the political system with demands for the repeal of restrictions on individual freedoms and an end to the Catholic Church’s privileges.

Janusz Palikot, a wealthy former vodka tycoon, has stormed into parliament with 10 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election at the head of a motley crew of political novices that includes Poland’s first transsexual lawmaker, Anna Grodzka.

A tired but jubilant Palikot, a former member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling centre-right Civic Platform that has won re-election, said on Monday Poland was ripe for change. “We’re fighting a culture of delegalisation. In Poland, you go to jail for insulting the President, for a word, for insulting religious feelings, insulting an official,” the 46-year-old divorcee and father of four told reporters.

“You go to jail for drinking beer and then walking with your bike. You go to jail for smoking a joint. For abortion. This is a nihilist policy which hurts people.”

Palikot’s Movement, as the party is known, has tapped into a rich vein of disaffection, especially among young people, by supporting gay rights, abortion, public funding for in vitro fertilisation and legalisation of soft drugs…

Palikot has scandalised conservative Poles with stunts such as waving a dildo and a toy gun at a news conference to publicise a rape case against a policeman, and with his outspoken call for an end to the Catholic Church’s privileges…

But Palikot wants to end tax exemptions for priests and public funding for religion classes in state schools.

Bravo!

I haven’t visited Poland in decades; but, it sounds like life is getting exciting. Challenging the Catholic Church not only demands sound analysis and forethought – it also sounds like the time is coming ripe for secular freedom for Polish culture.

 
A collection of 300 paintings worth millions of euros have been discovered in a Polish outhouse belonging to a 92-year-old former bricklayer, with police baffled as to how they got there.

The paintings were found mixed up with junk and rubbish in a dirty two-storey concrete building in the bricklayer’s garden near the north-western city of Szczecin.

Police said the mysterious collection included works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532. They also discovered a lithograph by the Polish artist Jozef Czajkowski, which disappeared from a museum in Katowice during the war…

The collection, having suffered from its 66 years in the outhouse, has now been moved to a museum in Szczecin. “Many of the pictures are in a terrible condition and we’re trying to identify them and find out where they came from,” said Przmyslaw Kimon, spokesman for Szczecin police. “Some of them are Italian so we’re in contact with the Italian authorities, and we are also working with Interpol.”

But police admitted to being perplexed as to how the bricklayer, now charged with handling stolen art, came to possess the paintings. Their investigation has also been hindered by the fact that two strokes have left the man known only as Antoni M. [owing to reporting restrictions] unable to communicate.

Most theories revolve around the possibility that the bricklayer had somehow managed to get hold of a collection of looted art, abandoned in the chaotic last weeks of the Second World War as Germans put life before property in their efforts to escape the advancing Red Army…

Possessing an interest in art he decided to keep the paintings rather than turn them into the authorities.
He also decided to keep them out of public sight. Stashing them in hiding places in his outhouse, he made the building off-limits to even his closest family.

The news of the discovery was welcomed by Leszek Jodlinski, director of the Silesia Museum in Katowice, one of the museums stripped bare by the Nazis during the war, and the former home of the Czajkowski lithograph.

BTW – ever wish to see a great film about Resistance fighters stopping a Nazi art hoard from being carried off to Germany, rent The Train [1964], starring Burt Lancaster.

 
Thanks, Ursarodinia

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Germans have been warned not to eat cucumbers until tests identify the source of a deadly E.coli outbreak which local officials say has killed 13 people. It is thought contaminated cucumbers were imported from Spain, but further tests are being carried out.

Germany has registered 1,200 confirmed or suspected E.coli cases so far. With cases reported in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK, Germany is set to hold crisis talks later.

In many of the reported cases, the gastrointestinal infection has led to Hemolytic-uremic Syndrome (HUS), which causes kidney problems and is potentially fatal.

One woman was taken to hospital in Poland on Monday. She was said to be in a serious condition after returning from a trip to the northern German city of Hamburg, which has seen the majority of infections.

Authorities in the Czech Republic, Austria and France have taken some Spanish-grown cucumbers off shop shelves amid contamination fears. Czech officials said contaminated cucumbers may also have been exported to Hungary and Luxembourg.

Suspicion has fallen on organic cucumbers from Spain imported by Germany but then re-exported to other European countries, or exported directly by Spain.

Austria has banned the sale of cucumbers, tomatoes and aubergines imported via Germany, while Russia has banned the import of some vegetables from Germany and Spain…

Two Spanish greenhouses identified as sources for the outbreak have been closed and are currently under investigation to see whether the outbreak originated there or elsewhere, said an EU spokesman…

The Sweden-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has called the outbreak “one of the largest described of HUS worldwide and the largest ever reported in Germany”…

The head of Hamburg University’s Eppendorf Clinic, Joerg Debatin, said more deaths were expected, as 30 people infected with HUS had lost kidney function.

Wow! Sounds a lot worse than any e.coli outbreaks we’ve suffered through here in the States. Though, the fact that we seem to have outbreaks with some regularity may have people already conscious of food-borne illness and responding more quickly. Including the bureaucrats.

UPDATE: German scientists say they’re now confident after extensive testing the source was not Spanish cucumbers.

A new analysis published by the UK journal Reproductive Health Matters shows that the criminalisation of abortion in Poland has led to the development of a vast illegal private sector with no controls on price, quality of care or accountability. Since abortion became illegal in the late 1980s the number of abortions carried out in hospitals has fallen by 99%. The private trade in abortions is, however, flourishing, with abortion providers advertising openly in newspapers.

Women have been the biggest losers during this push of abortion provision into the clandestine private sector. The least privileged have been hardest hit: in 2009 the cost of a surgical abortion in Poland was greater than the average monthly income of a Polish citizen. Low-income groups are less able to protest against discrimination due to lack of political influence. Better-off women can pay for abortions generating millions in unregistered, tax-free income for doctors. Some women seek safe, legal abortions abroad in countries such as the UK and Germany.

“In the private sector, illegal abortion must be cautiously arranged and paid for out of pocket,” says Agata Chełstowska, the author of the research and a PhD student at the University of Warsaw. “When a woman enters that sphere, her sin turns into gold. Her private worries become somebody else’s private gain.” The Catholic Church, highly influential in predominantly Catholic Poland, leads the opposition to legal abortion.

Since illegality has monetised abortion, doctors have incentives to keep it clandestine, “Doctors do not want to perform abortions in public hospitals,” says Wanda Nowicka, Executive Director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning. “They are ready, however, to take that risk when a woman comes to their private practice. We are talking about a vast, untaxed source of income. That is why the medical profession is not interested in changing the abortion law.”

The kind of “morality” enforced by religious fools, stuck into the Dark Ages. Just in case anyone wonders what might follow the Kool Aid Party and the rest of the Republican Crusaders.

A new Polish political party has ruffled conservative feathers in the Catholic country with a campaign to have the cross ousted from public buildings.

Supporters of the party want the crosses removed, or hung alongside the Star of David, in an attempt to diminish the power of the Church.

In a clear challenge to the strong and omnipresent influence of the Catholic Church in Poland, members of the Support Janusz Palikot party caused outrage in the city of Szczecin by trying to hang Jewish and Muslim symbols in the town’s council chamber alongside the Christian cross, before removing the cross…

The Christian cross is ubiquitous in government buildings in Poland and hangs from thousands of walls in schools and hospitals across the country.

A maverick politician – who said last week that “Poles have been slaves to the Catholic Church for a 1,000 years” – Mr Palikot argued that under the Polish constitution Poland is officially a secular state and therefore there should be no religious symbols.

As an alternative, he said that as the constitution guarantees the equality of all faiths, no one symbol should take precedent.

“Why should there be only one religious symbol?” the politician asked in a television interview.

“I’m all for removing all of them but that would be treated as an attack on the Church.”

We should run this dude for office in Chicago. After we take out a life insurance policy on him.

A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church…

Piotr Sionko, the spokesman for the John Paul II Center, said the vial will be encased in crystal and built into the altar of a church in the southern city of Krakow that is opening in May…

The blood was drawn for medical tests at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic shortly before John Paul’s death on April 2, 2005…

After John Paul’s death, some Polish officials said they hoped John Paul’s heart would be removed from his body and returned to his homeland for burial. However, church officials dismissed any possibility of dismembering the body, saying the age had passed for that practice.

The last part comes almost like a punchline. It’s interesting to watch the church “evolve”,
isn’t it?

Two enterprising Polish poachers used a home-made, radio controlled submarine to trawl for fish in a frozen lake.

Police in the small town of Zbaszyn in western Poland said they caught the two red handed with the submarine, although another man managed to escape when the officers approached the “three suspicious characters with nets on the lake”.

A search of the suspects revealed a hand-held GPS device, which took the police the next day to a 40-kilogram stash of fish, and five 200-metre nets.

“They drilled a hole in the ice and then dropped the submarine in on a tether,” said Romuald Piecuch, a local police spokesman. “They then manoeuvred it around under the ice with the net before bringing it back to the hole with the anything they had caught.” Despite their prowess at harvesting fish in a manner that won them the grudging respect of the police, the spokesman added that the value of the torpedo-like submarine probably exceeded the value of the fish.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. It doesn’t take a boatload of brains to be a crook.

Poland is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, still conservative and still religious, especially when compared with its European neighbors. But supporters and critics of the Roman Catholic Church all acknowledge that the society is changing. They agree that church representatives in Poland have lost authority and credibility, and that much of the population is moving toward a more secular view of life, one with a greater separation between church and state, and a rejection of church mandates on individual morality.

“We are considered the European museum of Catholicism, but let me tell you we are no longer,” said Szymon Holownia, program director for Religia TV, a relatively new station that aims to convince Poles that faith can and should be relevant in modern life with programs like a cooking show led by a nun. “The relationship between faith and state is changing; it is changing dramatically in Poland,” Mr. Holownia said. “It is really huge.”

“Twenty years of freedom and religion is evaporating,” he said. “This is the crisis of Christianity in Poland.”

Church supporters said the trend was evident in the numbers: 95 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholic, but only 41 percent attend Sunday Mass regularly. In the big cities of Warsaw and Krakow, only about 20 percent attend Mass regularly on Sundays, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Church. Supporters of the church also said that the numbers dropped far below the 41 percent when it came to accepting moral mandates about issues like divorce and in vitro fertilization, both of which the church opposes and a majority of people appear to support.

“It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide…

Antichurch sentiment has run so hot that one of the most popular politicians in the country, Janusz Palikot, started a political party based largely on an anticlerical platform…

RTFA. Lots of rationales and excuses offered by clergy who obviously are panicked over their loss of stature within Polish politics, fear of a massive reduction in social and political power in daily life.

That’s what happens when your ideology is irrelevant. That is, in nations where education and learning aren’t limited [or self-limited] to exclusively parochial concerns. True throughout Europe. Becoming true through Asia and Latin America.