Latest news with #Polish-language
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Yahoo
Law Student Accused of Murdering Woman in Grisly Axe Attack at University
A female staffer at the University of Warsaw in Poland was murdered in a grisly axe attack on campus, according to the BBC. The staffer, a 53-year-old porter, came "under attack in the main campus building on" the evening of May 7, 2025, BBC reported. Be forewarned that the details in this article are very disturbing. The suspect is a 22-year-old Polish man with unclear motives. He was described as "a third-year law student who was Polish but not from Warsaw," the BBC reported. The woman and suspect were not named. BBC reported that, after entering the campus, the suspect went to "the university's biggest lecture hall, the Auditorium Maximum building." According to Fox News, police found a severed head at the scene. "Police have detained a man who entered the University of Warsaw campus. One person died, another was taken to hospital with injuries," Warsaw police said, according to Fox. It's not clear whether the victim and suspect knew each other. According to a translation of Polsat News, a Polish-language news site, the suspect has been accused of "murder with particular cruelty, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse." Polsat News reported that the victim was attacked with an axe as she closed "the door to the Auditorium Maximum." A guard at the university tried to help her and "was seriously injured," the site reported. The President of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski wrote, according to Polsat News, that he was "shocked to hear about the macabre crime on the University of Warsaw campus." He expressed the "deepest sympathy" to the "family and loved ones of the murdered woman. I also hope that the man who was injured in the attack and was helping will fully recover." The victim was a mother of three, Polsat News reported.
Telegraph
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The secret (and unlikely) CIA operation that won the Cold War
The US's Central Intelligence Agency is not usually associated with benevolence. President Truman famously said he would never have agreed to its establishment in 1947 'if I had known it would become the American Gestapo'. Its backing of coups – Iran in 1953, Guatemala the following year, Chile in 1973 – and its funding of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, as well as covert tactics from political assassination to domestic wiretapping, make for a sorry record. It's all the more startling, then, to read in Charlie English's The CIA Book Club, that for the significant last decade of the Cold War, the CIA ran a large-scale 'books programme' smuggling banned western literature into one of its most significant theatres, Poland – an operation that was far more than benevolent, and eventually determining for democracy's victory in eastern Europe, if not the crumbling of the Soviet Union itself. The story starts two decades earlier. Young people in Poland in the 1960s had communist talking points relentlessly drummed into them, but still shared some of the intellectual confidence of youth in the West. Many had never seen any uncensored literature; they were nevertheless aware their lives were dominated, as throughout the eastern bloc, 'by a 'pretend press' that couldn't report the truth, 'pretend radio and television' that didn't address Poland's many problems, and 'pretend art' that was detached from reality'. When Polish opposition to communism emerged in the mid-1970s, three people became especially important figures. A young woman, Teresa Bogucka, had a Polish-language copy of Orwell's 1984 that her father had smuggled from Paris. Her friends were exhilarated and traumatised by its accuracy in describing their own lives. Teresa had the idea of setting up a 'flying library' of uncensored books. By 1978 she had collected 500 titles. Always circulating, the books could only be found by accident; every time the SB, Poland's secret police, arrested Teresa, they found no evidence of her crimes. From the West's point of view, physical combat across the Iron Curtain was out of the question: nuclear annihilation awaited them. The battle, instead, was for minds and hearts. As early as 1949, the CIA was funding the smuggling of books to Poland using eastern European phone directories to mail books directly to people. In 1975 it created the 'International Literary Centre' (note the British spelling to deflect suspicion), based in Manhattan and run by George Minden. No one understood the assignment better than Minden, a highly educated academic, exiled from his native Romania when his oilfields were confiscated by the Soviets. His mushrooming network of proxies – publishers, philanthropists, other exiles – began to run millions of banned titles into Poland and elsewhere, by authors from Hannah Arendt to Agatha Christie. The third fighter for truth was Mirosław Chojecki, a young Polish publisher who by the spring of 1980 had been arrested 43 times. A nuclear physicist by training, Chojecki was not well read but knew that communism was lying to him. Both his parents had fought in the partisan Polish Home Army, and his willingness to stand up for truth, which led to prison terms and a 33-day hunger strike, became an inspiration to fellow Poles. But history is never a graceful pendulum. The CIA Book Club is at its best telling the detailed – sometimes overly detailed – story of how repression in 1970s Poland brought about the Solidarity trade union in 1980, and Charlie English, a former international news editor, keeps the complexity of this multi-tracked drama well under control. And though martial law ushered in a near-decade of further subjection 18 months later, books, along with printing presses, paper and ink, continued to be secretly imported into Poland in industrial quantities. The results, cumulatively, were decisive. The Polish dissident Adam Michnik maintained that 'it was books that were victorious in the fight… They allowed us to survive and not go mad.' What the CIA itself believed about the role of its 'book club' in bringing down communism is less clear. At Langley the consensus was that its action to arm the Afghan mujahideen, resisting the Soviet Union's invasion at the time, was the conclusive factor in ending the Cold War. But in 1991, when Minden wrote his final report before resigning, the ILC had delivered close to ten million books, magazines and cassettes to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria over 35 years. It had been an operation of substantial cultural, and ultimately political, importance, with little collateral damage, and conducted at a fraction of the cost of running thousands of tons of weapons to militant Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. All one can finally say is that even if the CIA is as reprehensible, trigger-happy and poorly overseen as its detractors have long made out, its startling efforts to win the Cold War with books prove the adage that even a blind squirrel will occasionally turn up a nut. In this case, it was a nut that cracked the nutcracker
