Hidden for 70 years, a new invaluable contribution to Holocaust literature—the diary of Renia Spiegel—was rediscovered inside a desk in New York

Political entanglements undermine a once-authoritative and beloved institution

Most churches are focused on heaven, but in Poland, they seem to be providing a more earthly benefit: sanctuary for dozens of species of birds. That’s what biologists found when they surveyed the properties of 101 churches and an equal number of farmsteads in villages in southern Poland. Previous research had found that farms in Eastern Europe support large numbers of different kinds of birds, providing important sanctuaries for the species in areas where their more natural habitat was lost.

Poland belongs in the European Union but should be careful not to be “infected by social diseases” that dominate the bloc, ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said on Sunday. Speaking at a party convention ahead of local elections in October, Poland’s most influential decision-maker laid out the broad campaign priorities of the PiS. He defended his party’s democratic record and accused critics of serving “powerful interests and making deals with the mighty of the world”, in an apparent jab at the close ties between the liberal opposition in Poland and Brussels.

Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944...

Poland’s Foreign Ministry said it has dismissed hundreds of Soviet-era staffers and graduates of a top-flight diplomatic school in Moscow over the past two years. Moscow and Warsaw are at odds over the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. While Russia has slammed Poland’s removal of Soviet-era war monuments as illegal and immoral, many Poles today say they view the Soviet presence in the country as an occupation.

President Andrzej Duda offered to host the structure as a bulwark against Russia. President Trump said Warsaw would have to pay billions to use his name.

Donald Trump has praised Poland for “standing up for their independence”, a day after the European Union (EU) referred the country to court for firing judges in sweeping reforms. The US president also attacked Germany, which he suggested would become “totally dependent” on Russian energy following the completion of a joint gas pipeline, during a speech at the United Nations general assembly.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest hominid remains ever found in Poland. “The bones discovered by our team at Jaskinia Ciemna [a cave in the southern Małopolska region] are the oldest hominid remains from the area of Poland,” Professor Paweł Valde-Nowak of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków told PAP.

There are fewer and fewer of those who still remember. The Russian army entered Auschwitz — the network of extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland — on Jan. 27, 1945, liberating the most notorious site of the Holocaust. In the decades since, groups of survivors have gathered to honor that day — including an annual remembrance at Auschwitz itself. This year, they mark the 70th anniversary of liberation on Tuesday — a day that, for a significant portion of remaining...

Filmmaker Roman Polanski will attend a court hearing in Poland next week that will consider a US extradition request over a 1977 child sex crime conviction, his lawyer said. A spokeswoman for the court in the southern city of Krakow said the hearing would take place on 25 February. Polanski, who lives in France and is preparing to make a film in Poland, will attend. “In line with the declaration that was made before, Mr Roman Polanski will appear in the court,” Jan Olszewski...

Have you ever needed to deposit a fat stack of cash, but didn't want to travel to a bank? Poland’s Idea Bank has bolted ATMs into a fleet of cars that can be ordered via a smartphone app for no-fee deposits, wherever you are, even late at night. As long as you’re in Warsaw, Poland.

Some 50 Christian families fleeing war in Syria have arrived in Poland to begin new lives. A chartered plane from Beirut carrying about 150 refugees landed in Warsaw late Friday. The Syrians are being taken to a hotel, and within days they will begin the process of requesting asylum and being placed in housing. A few spoke to reporters, but they refused to be photographed or filmed, fearful of putting loved ones back home at more risk.

Last week, a pair of anonymous treasure hunters approached officials in Walbrzych, Poland​ via their lawyer to claim they had found an old Nazi loot train. Now officials have confirmed that the pair certainly found a train. Whether it's full of gold remains to be seen. As NBC News reports, a press officer confirmed that a military train had been found and the town's deputy mayor Zygmunt Nowaczyk​ made the following statement at a press conference...

The visitor center at the Auschwitz concentration camp is being criticized by visitors who were shocked to see showers set up outside of the Polish site over the weekend. For some, the cooling stations offered a dark reminder of the camp's horrifying past. As the area suffered from severe heat, the site's managers set up misting showers to keep visitors cool as temperatures soared well into the 90s.

The dream of indoor location sensing has always been just that - a dream. The difficulty of Wi-Fi tracking and other technologies has made it hard for anyone – from businesses to regular users – to figure out where they were in a venue. But the folks at Estimote, a Polish beacon company, may have just cracked the code.

Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz III–Monowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.

German prosecutors say they've charged a 91-year-old woman with 260,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations she was a member of the Nazi SS who served in the Auschwitz death camp complex. Schleswig-Holstein prosecutors' spokesman Heinz Doellel said Monday the woman, whose name wasn't disclosed due to German privacy laws, is alleged to have served as a radio operator for the camp commandant from April to July 1944.

The Russian ambassador to Poland has sparked outrage for putting some of the blame for World War II on Poland, creating a new spat amid deepening tensions between the Slavic nations. Russian Ambassador Sergey Andreev on Friday described the Soviet's 1939 invasion of Poland as an act of self-defense, not aggression. The comment prompted Poland's Foreign Ministry to declare Saturday that the ambassador...

“It’s not every day we get a phone call from the FBI."

Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis saved many lives by hastening Hitler's defeat.

Poland on Thursday signed a landmark deal to build the first EU gas pipeline to the isolated Baltic countries, reducing their uneasy reliance on Russian supplies. "You have witnessed history being made," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said after the signing of the 558-million-euro ($636 million) deal between Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Roman Polanski should be deported from Poland to the US to face sentence over a conviction for having sex with a minor in 1977, according to the leader of Poland’s newly elected Law and Justice party. Jarosław Kaczyński made the case an instrumental part of his campaign during the final stretch before he came to power last weekend. “There was open talk that he should not be made responsible for his deeds because he is an outstanding, world-famous film-maker,” Kaczyński said.

Radoslaw Sikorski plotted with the owner of Polish coalmines and electricity plants to use European Union sanctions against Russia to stop imports of rival, low-cost Russian coal in the Polish market. By John Helmer.

Engineers are set to start surveying a railway embankment in south-western Poland to establish how to dig out a “gold train” that is thought to have been buried there in the dying days of the Third Reich. The existence of a Nazi gold train, its whereabouts and its cargo – possibly stolen valuables and artworks – remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of the second world war.

Poland will sue Russia in a human rights court over Moscow's withholding of the wreckage of a Polish jet that crashed in thick fog over Russia in 2010 killing the Polish president, the country's foreign minister-designate said. Russia has so far declined to return wreckage, arguing it first needed to conclude its own inquiry. The decision by a new more nationalist Polish government to press the matter could add to tensions already stirred by Russia's annexation...

Doctors in Poland used a virtual reality system combining a custom mobile application and Google Glass to clear a blocked coronary artery, one of the first uses of the technology to assist with surgery. The imaging system was used with a patient who had chronic total occlusion, a complete blockage of the artery, which doctors said is difficult to clear using standard catheter-based percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI.

A German appeals court has cleared the way for the trial of a 95-year-old man accused of being an accessory to the murder of at least 3,681 people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. The higher court of Rostock in northern Germany deemed Hubert Z fit for trial, reversing a decision by a lower court that considered him too fragile for a legal process.

Thousands of backers of Poland's ruling conservative party marched in Warsaw on Sunday with the party leader to show their support for its policies amid a growing political conflict. The march, led by Law and Justice party head Jaroslaw Kaczynski, came a day after tens of thousands of government opponents demonstrated in Warsaw and elsewhere, saying the ruling party and its ally, President Andrzej Duda, are threatening democracy.

With attacks on the constitution, media and civil service, events have taken a dangerous turn. The country’s traditional friends should raise their voices. By Timothy Garton Ash.

The European Commission has launched a probe into policy changes in Poland that may clash with EU law. It is the first time such a move has been initiated by the EU against a member state. Speaking after a lengthy meeting of the EU executive on Wednesday, European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans said: "today we have decided that the (European) Commission will carry out a preliminary assessment on this matter under the rule of law framework."

Thousands of Poles marched through Warsaw on Saturday to protests against their new conservative government's plan to increase its surveillance powers, with some saying they feared Poland was following Hungary towards an "illiberal democracy." Since Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) party took power in November, its moves to take more control of the judiciary and the media have divided Poland and raised alarm bells in the Europe Union...

The first unit of Polish troops in the newly created national guard could be stationed along the border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad as early as this year. Polish defence officials confirmed three brigades would be sent to the country’s north east by the end of 2016. Fears over Russian expansionism have been heightened since the annexation of crimea in 2014.

A unique aerial journey with the photographer and cameraman Kacper Kowalski. It is an introduction to his latest photo book "Side Effects".