Word: lech
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Workers-rights advocate Lech Walesa won the Peace Prize in 1983 for co-founding the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union. Seven years later, he was elected President of Poland...
...against their enemies, it is targeting anyone with even remote ties to the communist past. In Poland this process has gained fresh momentum over the past year following the election of a right-wing, anti-communist coalition government led by twin brothers who began their careers battling communists alongside Lech Walesa and the Solidarity trade union movement. Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who is standing in for Wielgus until the Vatican names a replacement, said a witch-hunt is under way: "Today Archbishop Wielgus was tried. But what kind of trial is carried out on the basis of scraps of paper...
...twins talk to each other on the phone many times each day. "After all we have a family in common," Lech told TIME on the eve of his election. They recognize that their unusual relationship has the potential to raise eyebrows. Earlier this year, Lech skipped his brother's inaugural speech to Parliament, an occasion that Presidents have in the past attended, in order not to "distract" people, as Jaroslaw later explained. Soon after the speech, a reporter asked Lech whether it would become their policy that "where Prime Minister Kaczynski shows up, President Kaczynski does not?" "There might...
...appearance, the brothers are in fact very difficult to tell apart, although Lech, the President, has a small mole on his left cheek and another on the right side of his nose. They both stand about 5'4". Lech is married with a daughter while Jaroslaw is a bachelor who lives with his mother and a cat. Now 57, they came to prominence as 13-year-old child stars in the 1962 Polish film The Two Who Stole the Moon, in which they played mischievous but endearing blond brothers. Later, in the 1980s, they joined the Solidarity movement that would...
...Lech Kaczynski returned as Justice Minister in the late 1990s, promising to get tough on crime. That image served as a springboard to launch the Law and Justice Party, which the brothers control. The party went on to win closely fought Parliamentary elections last year and, shortly afterward, presidential polls in which Lech was a come-from-behind winner. Jaroslaw did not become Prime Minister right away. Fearful of being mistaken for his brother by a would-be assassin, however, he requested official government security not ordinarily accorded a party leader. He was appointed Prime Minister earlier this year when...