Word: polander
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...bring apocalyptic foreboding to the climate-change debate quite like Al Gore. Speaking on the last day of the two-week-long U.N. climate-change summit in Poznan, Poland, which concluded on Dec. 12, the Nobel laureate warned delegates from over 190 countries that the time for idle talk on global warming was over. "We now face a crisis that makes it abundantly clear that increased CO2 emissions anywhere are a threat to the integrity of this planet's climate balance everywhere," he said. "As a result the old divide between the North and South, between developed and developing countries...
...argument that with radicals threatening to take over the Solidarity movement and Moscow watching closely, he had no choice but to order the crackdown. Soviet troops put down a popular rebellion in Hungary in 1956 and destroyed a reformist Czech regime in 1968. Jaruzelski was acutely aware that Poland could suffer a similar fate. Martial law was a "dramatically difficult decision," but it "saved Poland from a looming catastrophe," he told the court...
...leaders of the very movement Jaruzelski crushed agree--and have emerged among his staunchest defenders. Former activist Kazimierz Kutz, now a member of parliament, says Jaruzelski's actions allowed moderates on both sides to prevail, eventually leading to the Round Table talks that brought a peaceful end to Poland's communist regime in 1989. Even Lech Walesa, the legendary Solidarity leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner who was interned for almost a year in the clampdown, has said that Jaruzelski would have been considered a "great patriot" had he lived in different times and that the trial was a "mistake...
...everyone feels the same. Speaker of the Senate Bogdan Borusewicz calls the takeover a "classic Latin-style military putsch" and says the trial may be Poland's last chance for justice. "Jaruzelski defended the communist system, not Poland," Borusewicz says. "He defended the communist dictatorship, not the state." Marek Krasko, a Warsaw accountant, remembers that as a 13-year-old, he welcomed martial law--because the schools were closed--until he saw his grandmother in tears at the prospect of civil war. "Martial law was a hard blow for Solidarity, and it pushed the country back," he says...
...Even as the international economy stands at the brink of collapse, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change complete their 14th meeting in Poland today in what may well be our last real chance to prevent environmental calamity in our lifetimes. It was inevitable that even this, the most critical of meetings, would be contaminated by the current recession, on the grounds that the first priority must be dealing with the problems facing us right...