Today’s news round up in Poland
Start your day with a summary of today’s top stories from Poland’s leading news sites.
Rp.pl – The government has plans to use PLN 25 billion (EUR 5.3 bln) from an off-budget Covid recovery fund to help cover the costs of energy subsidies, the Rzeczpospolita newspaper wrote on Wednesday. Despite being called the Anti-Covid Fund the government uses it for a number of purposes, the paper added, only loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic. Experts cited by Rzeczpospolita pointed out that although the fund is off-budget, dipping into it is still a use of public finances.
TVN24.pl – There are still around 4,500 polluting, illegal furnaces in Warsaw, the vast majority of which are used for domestic heating, despite a campaign to eradicate them, the news network TVN24 wrote. Since 2017, local governments have introduced clean-air rules forbidding the use of old-fashioned stoves, and have also provided subsidies to help people meet the costs of new and less-polluting devices. Owners of the old furnaces can face fines of up to PLN 5,000 (EUR 1,062).
TVPInfo.pl – The state-owned broadcaster TVPInfo cited an opinion poll which said that 45 percent of people want elections for the European Parliament brought forward owing to a corruption scandal. The result of the Social Changes poll, TVPInfo wrote, comes in the wake of a corruption scandal in which the number of suspects "gets bigger every week."
Wyborcza.pl – Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, has donated PLN 50,000 (EUR 10,600) to a fund supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a way of apologising to Radek Sikorski, an opposition politician and former foreign minister. Sikorski had said that he would regard a donation as an apology from Kaczynski for calling him a "diplomatic traitor." The incident dates back to 2016 and revolves around the 2010 Smolensk air disaster, which claimed the life of Kaczynski's brother Lech.
