Today’s news round up in Poland

Start your day with a summary of today’s top stories from Poland’s leading news sites.

TVPInfo.pl - State-owned broadcaster TVP Info reported that a German cardinal has claimed that "we are dealing with an attempt to partition Poland for the fifth time." Cardinal Gerhard Mueller made the claim during an award ceremony for Catholic publishers over the weekend. He said that a Putin advisor had apparently said that "in order to destroy Poland, you have to destroy Polish Catholicism, and then the way to Europe will be open." So Poland has to preserve its faith, if it wants to remain united and undivided, the cardinal added.

Wyborcza.pl - Anna Morawiecka, the sister of Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister, once had a fictitious job, the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza wrote on Monday. It said that Morawiecka had been "employed" full-time by the local council of the town of Trzebnica as an "administrative assistant" from June 3, 2019 till the end of that year even though the job did not exist and she had an actual job in Wroclaw.

Rp.pl – Almost 57 percent of Poles want rapid action to stop the dumping of hazardous materials into the River Odra, whatever the cost, according to a new opinion poll published in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. The IBRiS poll found that 56.9 percent of respondents wanted prompt action while 26.3 percent wanted action taken over a number of years. Only 1 percent thought nature should be left to deal with any problem alone. Last year the Odra, Poland's second longest river, was hit by an algae bloom that killed hundreds of tonnes of fish and other aquatic life.

TVN24.pl – Janusz Cieszynski, the digital affairs minister, has defended his decision in 2020 to purchase over 1,000 ventilators from a company headed by an arms-dealer with no prior experience in medical supplies. In an interview with news broadcaster TVN24, Cieszynski, who was then a deputy health minister, said he had "nothing to apologise for" even though most of the ventilators failed to appear despite the government spending millions of zloty and the Covid pandemic raging. Cieszynski said the company had been positively vetted by Poland's intelligence agencies and the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau.