“The government seizes money from the unemployed to patch a budget hole,” writes Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

According to the budget draft for 2012, there is over 2.5 billion euro surplus on the Labour Fund and the Guaranteed Employee Benefit Fund, which are supposed to support unemployed financially and employees of companies which went bankrupt. In spite of the surplus, however, Polish employees have to contribute additional 2.5 billion euro to the funds and have no influence on how the money will be spent. “It’s an outrageous practice. We do not pay fees so that the state grew rich but to activate the unemployed and help companies find skilled workers,” Jeremi Mordasewicz from the Polish Confederation of Private Employers Lewiatan told Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

More than half of the students from leading Polish universities are willing to work abroad, writes the Rzeczpospolita daily, quoting a report by the Warsaw School of Economics and consulting company Deloitte. “We are losing the battle over talents,” says Tomasz Rostkowski from the Warsaw School of Economics and adds that when the West recovers from the recession, Poland will have a serious problem because ambitious, well-educated young people will leave the country tempted by better job offers and some may never come back. Biotechnology, Physics and Chemistry students can already count on attractive grants and employment at modern laboratories and companies in the Netherlands or Germany. “It’s not an exodus yet, but in some fields, such as engineering or technology brain drain is a real threat,” concludes Rzeczpospolita.

Google Street View gets ready for Euro 2012, writes Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Live images of five Polish cities which will host the championship will be posted on the internet at the beginning of 2012. Football fans will be able to follow the streets of Warsaw, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Kraków to find the way to the stadiums, fan zones, hotels, pubs and popular tourist spots.

“Poles go to war to become Americans,” headlines the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. The U.S. armed forces have launched the “Go to Army” recruiting campaign for foreigners with green cards, mainly Latinos and Poles.

In exchange for serving the U.S. Army in war-affected territories volunteers instantly receive American citizenship. “I will also get 1,400 dollars a month, insurance and 30 days paid holiday,” says one of the volunteers. The Pentagon does not reveal how many Poles have already been drafted but the daily’s informant who recruits Poles to the U.S. Army claims that the number of Poles who serve in American armed forces amounts to 500. As many as twenty Polish soldiers have already died serving under the American banner in Iraq and Afghanistan, writes Gazeta Wyborcza.

 (mg)