The Latvian Gambit

The following introduction comes from an article I wrote on the Baltic Review

The British politician Harold Wilson once said that “A week is a long time in politics”. For Polish politicians, never has this been truer. At the beginning of the week Poland hosted the Russian first couple with the Polish President meeting the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday. Bronislaw Komorowski, then went to the USA and met with US President Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday. In the midst of these two important meetings came new releases from the Wikileaks website concerning NATO contingency plans, which had the potential to embarrass all three presidents.

Click here for more.

The news that never was

Wikileaks has to my mind made a thing of creating expectation prior to the release of the mundane. In its recent batch of releases we learn that Nato has "drawn up classified plans to defend Poland and the Baltic states from Russian attack" and this has led President Dmitry Medvedev to be a bit perturbed in his recent visit to Warsaw.
Yet forgive me for being a bit slow, but is this really news and are the Russians really shocked or just spinning the story for political advantage? Since the Baltic states inclusion in NATO in 2004 a contingency plan has been lacking, for fear of upsetting the Russians. However, this is like the fire brigade not perceiving of the possibility of there being a fire. The fact that a contingency plan is written does not automatically return everyone to their Cold War positions and were they not to write such a plan then they would be failing in their duty as a defence alliance (as in deed they have done since 2004; it could be argued).
The inclusion of the Baltic States in 'Eastern Guardian' is normal pragmatic military planning.

Dead man's boots

There is an old phrase that means a position/trade is very hard to advance within because you have to wait for the person above you to leave or die in order to take their place, hence 'dead man's boots'.
Why am I talking of some smelly fellas footwear? Well, being the simple Englishman that I am, I naturally understood that when the Mayor (or President) of Lodz was booted out (excuse the over use of foot related vocabulary, but I couldn't resist) that a new one would be elected. Oh how wrong I was.
It is only due to a passing remark of a colleague that the truth was unveiled to this intrepid little explorer. For the best part of a year, Lodz has been in the hands of a prime-ministerial stand-in. PM Tusk simply appointed some bloke to do the job. Problem was that as an un-elected official he does not/did not hold all the powers of a full president.
The up-shot: money from one department can't be re-assigned to another etc... and Lodz remains in a mess. Only now after 9 months do we have a new PO President-elect. Hanna Zdanowska won the run-offs against SLD Dariusza Jońskiego with a roughly 60/40 split of the votes. That said only only 22.34 percent of the electorate turned out to vote and so 60% is not much, but hey!
Let's see what President Zdanowska is able to do with Lodz's often chaotic administration.