Word: polisher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...governing Poland for the past two years, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have been the butt of many jokes. Some play predictably off their diminutiveness. Others, more bizarrely, involve potatoes. One Berlin newspaper last year splashed a photo of a spud on its front page alongside one of Lech, the Polish President, and inquired: "Which one is coming to visit?" A Polish satirist recently lamented the shortage of humorists to cope with the volume of material that the twins are generating: "Life just surpasses my capabilities," said cartoonist Szczepan Sadurski...
...crisis go back to the founding of the government. In 2006, unable to secure the votes to rule alone or to hammer out a coalition with other mainstream parties, Jaroslaw invited two fringe political groupings - the nationalist Self-Defense Party, or Samoobrona, and the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families - to join the government in exchange for Cabinet posts. Samoobrona leader Andrzej Lepper, a pig farmer who has been convicted of slander and assault, became Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister, while League of Polish Families leader Roman Giertych, the former head of an ultraright nationalist youth group with...
...matters of foreign policy, Civic Platform leaders are just as staunchly nationalistic as their rivals. On Aug. 15 - the same day that Lech Kaczynski paraded alongside columns of tanks and troops to celebrate a great Polish victory over Russian Bolshevik forces in 1920 - the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk, a prospective Prime Minister, did his own bit for Polish patriotism by trying (unsuccessfully) to enter Belarus to celebrate the holiday with Polish nationals there. Economists, for their part, say that while the Civic Platform is friendlier toward business than the current government, it still may not have the political will...
...Polish sociologist Kinga Dunin, writing in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, described the difference between the two groupings by invoking potatoes, again. If the Kaczynskis are plain old tubers, she wrote, the Civic Platform politicians are French fries. The cut is different and their appearance may attract more consumers, but "the thing is that French fries are made of potatoes and it is not possible to hide it." To be sure, some things will change. What critics regard as Jaroslaw's preference for loyalty over competence - evidenced, they say, by key appointments in his Cabinet - may not be repeated. And some...
...PARIS-BORN JEW AND THE son of Polish immigrants, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger sparked plenty of controversy --especially as Archbishop of Paris. Despite feeling hurt by Jewish leaders who called him a traitor, Lustiger, the only modern Catholic prelate to be born Jewish (he converted at age 14), aggressively pursued a bridge-building agenda that included denouncing anti-Semitism and championing interfaith relations. Asked to sum up his life, Lustiger, whose mother died at Auschwitz, said he was "a Cardinal, a Jew and the son of an immigrant...