Tag: Poland

Oct 22 2011

Internationally Trans

I figure international news includes the United States.  There’s a pretty even split between stories from other countries and national stories, presented so the public might know a little better what’s happening of interest to people in the trans community.

Poland

Anna Grodzka, 57, became the first ever Polish lawmaker to have had sex reassignment…which makes her the only current transsexual national legislator on the planet.  Spain’s Carla Antonelli is transgender, but has not had sex reassignment surgery.

Grodzka runs Trans-Fuzja (website is in Polish), a foundation which supports Poland’s transpeople and says she decided to run in order to promote the work of the foundation.  She won 19,451 in the Krakow II electoral district, making her the top vote-getter for Palikot’s Movement in that district and thereby winning one of the 460 seats in Poland’s lower house, the Sejm.

The world’s first transsexual MP was Georgina Beyer of New Zealand’s Labour Party, from 1999 until she resigned her seat in 2007.

Today, Poland is changing. I am the proof along with Robert Biedron, a homosexual and the head of an anti-homophobia campaign who ran for office in Gdynia.

–Anna Grodzka

Grodzka says that the time has come for sexual minorities to enjoy equal rights in Poland.

Enough of this concealing of the truth.  This group of people, even if small, has its rights and they should be respected. They should not be pushed into oblivion.

On her to-do list are legal partnerships, job security, and state funding of sex change procedures.

Apr 16 2010

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – Confederate History Month

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::



Nate Beeler, Washington Examiner, Buy this cartoon

Apr 10 2010

Tragic Air Crash Kills Polish President, Scores More, in Russia

Poland’s President, Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria, and much of his cabinet, and all the passengers have been killed in a terrible airplane crash near Smolensk, Russia, when the ancient Tu -154 Tupolev carrying them missed the runway in thick fog and went down.  There were no survivors.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

“We still cannot fully understand the scope of this tragedy and what it means for us in the future. Nothing like this has ever happened in Poland,” Paszkowski (foreign ministry spokesperson) said. “We can assume with great certainty that all persons on board have been killed.”

The crash is likely to be a setback in Polish-Russian relations which had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre.

Russia never has formally apologized for the murders of some 22,000 Polish officers, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest near Katyn was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Rossiya-24 showed hundreds of people around the Katyn monument, many were holding Polish flags, some of them were weeping.

In a case of horrible irony, President Kaczynski and his army Chief of Staff and Deputy Foreign minister  were to attend a memorial service to mark the Kaytn Massacre, or Zbrodnia Kaytnska, near Smolensk,  when about 22,000 Polish POW officers were murdered by the Soviet Secret Service NKVD  during World War 2  by order of Stalin, in 1940.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K…

Sep 17 2009

Obama Scraps Central European “Missile Defense”!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting what would be maybe the best move, yet, by the Obama Administration:

The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran’s long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

This is a brilliant move, on several levels, the first and foremost being that “missile defense” is an enormously expensive farce that has yet to come close to being a proven technology. Despite billions upon billions poured into the coffers of its various contractors. Beyond that, though, merely attempting to put even an ostensibly advanced weapons system in Central Europe, in nations that were once part of the former Soviet Union’s buffer zone, was seen as a blatant provocation to Russia, thus politically enabling the hard line Putin regime. As explained by the BBC:

Aug 30 2009

Obama may not deploy Bush’s missile defense in Poland

Gazeta Wyborcza is reporting the Obama administration will not implement the Bush administration’s plan for a missile “shield” in Eastern Europe.  “The missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic are virtually certain to be abandoned“.

The Polish newspaper names Washington lobbyist Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance, as its source. “The signals that the generals in the Pentagon are sending are absolutely clear: as far as missile defence is concerned, the current US administration is searching for other solutions than the previously bases in Poland and the Czech Republic,” Ellison said.

“The administration has been sounding out for a couple of weeks now how the Congress will react when the plans for building the missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic are dumped,” Ellison said a Congressional source has told him.

Sep 01 2008

Fighting the Bosses – Poland: Strikes continue against rocketing food and fuel costs

Original article, by Wojtek Orowiecki, Group for a Workers’ Party (GPR), CWI in Poland and sub-headed Government and bosses try to crush the workers’ movement via socialistworld.net:

A wave of strikes and protests has been sweeping through Poland for months, above all due to the galloping price of food and energy. In July there were demonstrations of several thousands of workers in a number of towns and more groups of workers are preparing to strike. However, as we can expect, the government and bosses are not taking this lying down. Changes to the labour code have been announced for September, which make strikes practically impossible. At the same time striking workers are victimised and face the use of force even now.

Mar 01 2008

Bush: Buy Our Weapons or Iran will hit Paris with Nukes

Think the Bush Administration is done trying open new fronts in using scare tactics in the service of war profiteering?  Think again.

In yet another display of mindboggling display of fearmongering coupled with greed, the Bush Administration is now now telling Europe that it needs to buy American missile defense systems–or else.  From the Los Angeles Times:

With American officials working to close a deal on a missile defense system in Europe, the head of the U.S. program warned Thursday that Iran was within two or three years of producing a missile that could reach most European capitals.

“They’re already flying missiles that exceed what they would need in a fight with Israel. Why? Why do they continue this progression in terms of range of missiles? It’s something we need to think about,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told a conference here on missile defense… [snip]

“Our short-range defenses could protect Rome and Athens,” Obering said, but he warned that London, Paris and Brussels would remain vulnerable “against an Iranian [intermediate-range missile] threat.”

That’s right, mes amis, meine Damen und Herren.  Unless you buy our preposterously expensive and utterly ineffectual Star Wars “defense” technology, dangerous terrorist Ahmadinejad and his merry band of clerics will unilaterally start a war with Israel, create a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, and use the expanded conflict to send your beloved Arc de Triomphe and Reichstag into the stratosphere.