The Economy Ministry has suffered an embarrassing mishap after a pendrive distributed as part of a campaign to promote Polish entrepreneurship was alleged to have Chinese origins.

„This is a situation that should never have happened”, commented ministry spokesperson Danuta Ryszkowska-Grabowska.

She added that Economy Minister Janusz Piechociński would ensure that there were „consequences” for those that handled the project.

The situation came to light after recipients of the pendrive found that the product’s wrapping not only carried the slogan „made in Poland”, but also „made in China”.

The pendrives, which contain material promoting the Polish economy, were purchased by the ministry through a public procurement procedure.

A new survey indicates that over a decade after Poland joined the EU, 41 percent of young Poles still plan to emigrate.

The poll by Millward Brown for commercial broadcaster TVN questioned Poles between the ages of 18 and 34.

Asked whether they had plans for temporary or permanent emigration, 41 percent of respondents said yes while 58 percent said no. Just 1 percent said they were undecided.

About 580,000 Polish citizens left their homeland after accession to the EU in 2004, with the UK proving the most popular destination.

By 2013 the number of Polish immigrants had risen to 1.9 million. Meanwhile, the number of those returning remains smaller than those leaving each year.

According to the European Commission, the average time spent abroad by Polish immigrants is 10 years.

Several hundred people took part in a peaceful march on Sunday afternoon in Legionowo, central Poland, in memory of a teenager who choked to death on a bag of drugs following a police action.

The march, which was led by the family of Rafał E. (full name withheld under Polish privacy laws), followed a series of riots and arrests in the town in connection with the death.

The 19-year-old died in hospital on 9 March, after police tried to question him on the street.

The teenager had allegedly panicked when police approached him, and he swallowed a bag of marijuana. Police tried to resuscitate him on the spot when he collapsed, but failed.

Family members insinuated that the death was not accidental, and that police should be held culpable.
However, an autopsy appeared to confirm that the 19-year-old died after a bag of marijuana became trapped in his trachea. There were no traces of physical abuse.

During Sunday’s March, the dead teenager’s family encouraged locals to sign a petition calling for the policemen involved in the incident to be suspended from their duties.

The owner of Polish ice cream firm Grycan has enthused that China is among the countries where his company is taking off.

Zbigniew Grycan told the Rzeczpospolita daily that his firm has witnessed ”dynamic growth” over the last two years on ten markets in Europe and Asia.

„This is happening on the Chinese market, among others,” he noted.

„We believe that this situation will continue over the next few years.”

Grycan stressed that rather than providing ice cream for other brands, he is focusing on building recognition of his own company.

„This is a much more difficult task, and one that requires careful selection,” he added.

Besides exporting tubs of ice cream, Grycan also has a network of close to 130 ice cream parlours. The vast majority are in Poland, although the firm recently opened two in the Czech Republic.

Zbigniew Grycan says that he is currently looking into new proposals both for the Czech market and others.

Poland’s medical-tourism business was worth PLN 1.4 billion (EUR 340 million) in 2014, a 10 percent rise on the previous year, a report finds.

Last year, 390,000 foreigners used Polish hospitals and outpatient facilities, the Polish Association of Medical Tourism (PSTM) said in a report.

The average value of a procedure amounted to PLN 3,600, a whopping 50 percent jump on the level in 2011.
The trade association expects continued growth of about 10 percent a year thanks to lower costs than in the western Europe. Globally the industry is growing at 20 percent.

Dentistry and plastic surgery remain among the most popular services for foreigners, but interest in neurosurgery and oncology is also on the rise.

President Bronisław Komorowski moved a step closer to the ratification of the European Council convention against violence on women, sending the issue to the top of the presidential campaign agenda.

The president is yet to ratify the convention, which meets strong opposition from the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.

The convention would introduce to the law concepts utterly alien to the Polish culture, tradition and customs, said Andrzej Duda, running for the conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party.
The introduction of the concept of “gender” to Poland will work as a “ticking bomb”, Duda said in an interview for the Catholic Radio Maryja.

His party leader, former prime minister, Jarosław Kaczyński, rang into the studio during the interview to praise Duda as a hard-working and effective man of faith.

Over the weekend, Duda unveiled in Warsaw a “Bronisław Komorowski museum of national agreement” to mock the incumbent’s alleged inactivity over his five-year term. The museum will be open until election day.
Meanwhile, far-right member of European Parliament, Janusz Korwin-Mikke launched his presidential campaign, as an even more obscure candidate, Waldemar Deska of the Libertarian Party, withdrew in his favour.

Over 90 percent of the Polish gambling industry is made up of illegal businesses.

Following the tightening of rules in the industry, such grey economy has grown exponentially, writes daily Rzeczpospolita, quoting data by the Supreme Audit Office (NIK).

The internet is booming with illegal gambling, and the number of foreign companies offering it increased from 86 in 2012, to 156 in 2014.

Customs officers who supervise gambling in Poland, say that they cannot put an end to it, the NIK report said.

“These illegal internet bookmakers have conquered 91 percent of the market. Their turnover is estimated at PLN 5 billion zloty (EUR 1.2 billion) per year,” Paweł Rabantek, spokesperson of the Association of Polish bookmakers, said.

He added that these companies do not pay taxes and the Polish coffers are losing out hundreds of millions of zloty because of this.

Russia’s ambassador in Warsaw has claimed that Polish fears of his country are unfounded and that such anxieties have been caused by the media.

Asked in an interview with Polish Radio whether he had noticed that ”many Polish politicians, political experts but also ordinary people, are quite simply frightened by Russia”, Ambassador Sergey Andreyev said that he had, but denied that fears were due to Russian activity in Ukraine.

The ambassador argued that anxieties arose ”thanks to the efforts of the Polish media… unfortunately.”

Andreyev also denied that Russia had broken any international laws in the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, stressing the referendum held on 30 March.

The ambassador was reminded that President Vladimir Putin had said a year ago that uniformed soldiers at large in Crimea in February 2014 had probably bought their uniforms ”in a shop” and were not Russian soldiers.

Andreyev was also reminded that last Sunday, Russian television broadcast a trailer of a documentary about Crimea, in which Putin described a key meeting with security chiefs, prior to the annexation.

”When we were parting, I said to my colleagues: we must start working on returning Crimea to Russia,” the Russian leader had said.

However, Andreyev argued that the documentary had not been screened in full yet, adding that ”what happened in Crimea was the result of the coup in Kiev,” which the ambassador claimed occurred thanks the efforts of the West, against the wishes of ”Russian-speakers” in Ukraine.

”The people in Crimea did not want to recognise the results of the coup,” he continued.

”And Russia’s task was to help the people of Crimea.”

Meanwhile, Ambassador Andreyev forecast that as far as Polish-Russian relations are concerned, ”I think that sooner or later the crisis will pass and normalization will occur.”

The Polish banking industry’s proposals for resolving the problems of Swiss franc-denominated mortgage borrowers come under fire from all sides in the mainstream press.

Both pro-government 'Gazeta Wyborcza’ and right-wing 'Rzeczpospolita’ lambasted the Polish Banking Association’s (ZBP) calls for the central bank or the state budget to co-finance the resolution to the problem.

For years banks made a killing from the spread between the exchange rate they charged their mortgage clients and the market rate, 'Gazeta Wyborcza’ points out, which makes the taxpayer bailout particularly unpalatable.

Rzeczpospolita points out the proposal’s lack of details and the unfavourable conditions the banks offer their customers. Few borrowers would convert the debt on proposed terms, which means the proposal fails in the attempt to resolve the systemic threat posed by Swiss franc mortgages.

Poland has doubts about the proposed joint European Union armed forces, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said after meeting her French counterpart, Manuel Valls in Warsaw on Thursday.

Poland sees NATO as the chief guarantee of security, she added, and is concerned about costly duplication of functions and confusion over lines of command. The European Union wants to restore peace in Ukraine via negotiations and, if necessary, sanctions, Kopacz also said.

After the meeting, the Polish and French government heads told reporters the EU backs the Minsk agreement between Russia and Ukraine, negotiated with the participation of France and Germany.

The European Commission is working on ever more painful economic sanctions against Russia in the event ceasefire violations continue, Kopacz said.