Lithuania’s newly-inaugurated President visited Warsaw this week on his first state visit and expressed a strong will to cooperate with Poland on many fronts. Polish President Andrzej Duda said at a joint press conference „Two days after his inauguration, the new president came to Poland. This is really a great sign for us when it comes to building neighbourly relations, Polish-Lithuanian relations. I also take this as an obligation for myself to strive to build these relations as well as possible”.

Duda thanked the Polish minority in Lithuania for voting for the new Lithuanian president and said he hoped this would bode well for the future of the Polish minority’s rights. An estimated 165,000 Poles live in Lithuania, representing over 5 percent of the population.

POLAND AUTHORITIES CONDUCTING 'BIGGEST SEARCH’ EVER FOR BOY WHOSE FATHER WAS KILLED BY TRAIN

A search for a missing five-year-old boy in Poland has stretched into another day in what authorities have described as the largest to ever take place. The hunt for the boy, Dawid Zukowski, began after his father failed to deliver him to his mother and then died after being hit by a train 20 miles from Warsaw. Before killing himself, David’s father sent a text message to the boy’s mother saying that she would never see her son again.

Authorities have deployed sniffer dogs and drones in addition to combing through more than 7,400 acres of land and abandoned buildings around the highway where the father’s car was last seen.

Polish police are also working with soldiers from the territorial defence force and German police. The authorities are still stressing that they are still looking for the boy and dispelled media reports that the boy’s blood was found on the father’s clothing, saying that further testing is needed, Polsat News reported.

The police have been appealing to people for any information and have published images of the boy, who is both Polish and Russian, and of his Polish father.

POLAND LEADS THE WAY IN EU FOR RESIDENCY PERMITS

Poland is first in the EU when it comes to granting first time resident permits, according to EU led stats office – Eurostat.
Over 3 million migrants from outside of the EU received the right to stay within the Union for up to three months and Poland contributed almost 22 percent of this number, amounting to just over 683,000 permits.

Eurostat said that: „Poland was the main country giving first residence permits to people from Ukraine (88 percent), while in Germany 66% of permits were given to Syrian nationals.”

In the EU as a whole, Ukrainians received 21% of the total allotted resident permits, before Syria (7 percent), China (6 percent), India and United States (5 percent each).

According to latest data, 59 percent of work permits for non-EU citizens were issued in Poland.Apart from Ukrainians, the country welcomed almost 43 thousand Belarusians and 8 thousand Moldovans.

WILD BISON DISCOVERED LIVING NEAR SŁUPSK

Majestic wild bison have been discovered walking around fields between two suburbs of Słupsk. Wild bison typically live in more remote areas a long way from where they were spotted this week. Wild bison can be seen in the Białowieża Forest of Belarus and eastern Poland, but they can be sometimes be found in other areas of Poland in smaller populations.

In Brzeżno this week a group of diving enthusiasts equipped with specialized equipment came along to clean the seabed near the pier.
In three hours, the group from the Tryton diving centre collected submerged rubbish from around the pier.

The initiative was founded in cooperation with Greenpeace Polska who were looking for a group of divers who would take on such a challenge. They decided to focus on places where rubbish can accumulate and decided that the pier would be as good a place as any, assuming that currents and people would mean that the pier would serve for rich pickings.

Within two hours, a dozen or so objects were removed from the water – two jars, a rug, some beer cans and a few bits of plastic. In previous forays, the teams have uncovered much larger troves of rubbish. The organizers believe that society is becoming more conscious about properly disposing of waste. While the divers were cleaning the sea bed, the Greenpeace volunteers were holding workshops on the beach with educational quizzes.