Word: polander
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John Paul's impact on the world has already been enormous, ranging from the global to the personal. He has covered more than half a million miles in his travels. Many believe his support of the trade union Solidarity in his native Poland was a precipitating event in the collapse of the Soviet bloc. After he was nearly killed in 1981, he visited and pardoned his would-be assassin in jail. Asked an awed Mehmet Ali Agca: "Tell me why it is that I could not kill you?" Even those who contest the words of John Paul do not argue...
...level. This time it was Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin who dropped the big-grin, buddy-buddy act of their previous six face-to-face meetings and traded barbs. Clinton chided Russia indirectly for opposing NATO's plans to define the criteria for admitting Moscow's former satellites Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary by the end of 1995. NATO is the "bedrock" of European security, said Clinton, and expanding it will make "new members, old members and nonmembers" safer. And if Russia thinks otherwise? Well, tough. "No country outside will be allowed to veto expansion...
...final installment in the Kieslowski-Piesiewicz Blue, White and Red trilogy. The films treat the subjects of liberty, equality and fraternity in three different countries (France, Poland, Switzerland). Red was shot in Geneva, with a mostly Swiss cast, yet when the Swiss submitted the film for a foreign-language Oscar, the word came down that Red was ineligible -- guilty, apparently, of insufficient Swissness. The decision was stupid. Someone should tell the Motion Picture Academy that films are made by individuals, not by nations...
...Kohl likes NATO so much he wants to see it grow bigger. He is uncomfortable with Germany's exposed position on the frontier between the solidity of NATO and the uncertainty of what used to be the Warsaw Pact. He would like to move NATO's border east, embracing Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, even in the face of vehement opposition from Russia. On that score he may face Washington's displeasure too, even if Bill Clinton did say when he visited Germany last July, "I always agree with Helmut...
Kapuscinski is a writer who can make a point. A best-selling author in Poland, he is widely known in the rest of Europe and in America for The Soccer War, a collection of daredevil reportage from the Third World. Imperium too is a bravura performance, a kind of New Journalism about the Old World. As a youth in Soviet-dominated Pinsk, Poland, which is now in Belarus, Kapuscinski saw friends and teachers disappear -- part of Stalin's mass deportation and resettlement program that aimed to replace diverse nationalities with homo sovietus. This misfortune, as a dour professor in Baku...