Police handcuff football idols, cyber crime spreads in Poland, F-16s full of technical failures and separate classes for Roma kids. 

Presented by Slawek Szefs 

The major tabloids, SUPER EXPRESS and FAKT, headline a coastal resort brawl involving top names of Poland’s football elite. One of the better first division goalkeepers Radoslaw Majdan, known even better to some as the ex-husband of pop star Doda, together with his friend Piotr Swierczewski – a former national team player – were arrested by a special police squad after verbally insulting and then physically attacking officers who tried to quell their loud and aggressive behavior in a public place. As a result, the heavily intoxicated men had been handcuffed and arrested on charges of assaulting police officers on duty, for which Polish law carries a maximum penalty of ten year imprisonment. Both papers express absolute contempt for the footballers’ outrageous actions, the more so, as both have been the sports idols of many teenage fans. Now, it’s more than certain that even if they manage to avoid prosecution, their sports careers seem to have been erased. Their club Polonia Warsaw has immediately suspended them, pledging to relegate the players should they be found guilty. Needless to add, the fate of Majdan’s and Swierczewski’s contracts currently under negotiation has been sealed. 

GAZETA WYBORCZA looks at a relatively new category of crime which started decades ago as simple bank robberies. The paper studies the example of a Polish internet company which lost over a million zloties (roughly half a million dollars) in three days through a hacker attack. And this is not a Polish phenomenon exclusively. Experts’ estimates speak of losses in the European economy to the tune of 65 billion euros annually due to cyber crime operations. The figure is bound to rise, they warn. Click, click, this is a holdup – writes Gazeta Wyborcza. 

POLSKA daily is perplexed by the surprisingly low technical performance of American F-16 fighter jets purchased by the Polish air force less than two years ago. Just the other day, one of the 41 planes presently in service had to make an emergency landing at Warsaw’s military airport because of an engine system malfunction. It seems technical problems are a daily routine as in 2007 alone over 1700 various failures have been registered in Polish F-16 log books. But though trouble shooting and repairs have cost some 120 million dollars to date, maintenance crews as well as the MOD see nothing extraordinary in this. It’s a complicated machine saturated with electronic devices, so things do happen, one of the air force mechanics told the newspaper. 

DZIENNIK focuses on a case of racial segregation reported in an elementary school in Maszkowice, a village in south-eastern Poland, where Roma children have classes in a separate building. Why? Because we do not speak Polish, the kids explained to a reporter… in perfect Polish! Upon closer investigation it turned out that such practices are not that uncommon in various other localities with sizeable Roma communities. This is the twisted result of a concept launched back in the Eighties by the national chaplain of the Roma in Poland, Father Stanislaw Opocki, who considered such classes would create a more suitable environment for teaching Roma children and therefore encouraging their parents to send them to school in the first place. What initially appeared to be a good solution quickly backfired and in 2004 when Poland became an EU member the Council of Europe demanded the immediate discontinuation of such practices. Despite that, classes for Roma children have remained in six localities till this very day. The Association of Roma People in Poland has addressed a letter of protest to the PM as well as the parliamentary committee for ethnic minorities calling this simply a case of apartheid.