North Macedonia’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has been left in a vacuum as the prospect of EU accession talks were torpedoed by France’s Emmanuel Macron. President Macron alone opposed the formal go-ahead to EU membership negotiations with North Macedonia and neighbouring Albania.

The EU’s snub also sent a bad message across the Balkans – to would-be members Kosovo and Bosnia and even Serbia and Montenegro, which are both many years into membership negotiations.

For young Macedonians in particular, the rejection comes as a blow, setting back the European aspirations of a new generation.

Katyn museum named ‘best public building’ in Central Europe

Warsaw’s Katyn Museum has been named the best public building in Central and Eastern Europe at the latest edition of the prestigious East Centric Architecture Triennale, held every three years in Bucharest.

150 projects were shortlisted and then presented to an international panel of prominent architects, critics and theorists.

The Katyn Museum beat off stiff competition from design in Germany and Austria. Another shortlisted buildings was The Ulma Family Museum dedicated to Poles Saving Jews In WWII.

The design team behind the Katyn Museum explained the challenges they faced commemorating the cold-bloodied murder of over 20,000 Polish officers held as Soviet prisoners of War.: “It was a difficult topic to broach. We have long wondered what a commemoration of the victims of this massacre should look like, and we eventually decided that it should not just speak of death, but also the lives of the victims and their families. We wanted the museum to be an expression of their memory.” http://www.muzeumkatynskie.pl/

November 1st is a time when people in Poland traditionally remember those who have lived before us. Representatives of 10 religions met at the Cemetery of Cemeteries in Gdansk to remember and pray for the Dead.

The symbolic Cemetery of Cemeteries in Gdansk which is close to the central train station remembers 27 cemeteries closed down by the Communists after the war which was a part of so-called historic policy aimed at removing any memory of former residents of Gdansk. Ecumenical Commemorations have been taking place at this site since 2002.

After the ceremony participants also lit candles in front of the monument to victims of the typhus epidemic that took place in the prison in Gdansk just after the end of World War II. 1,100 prisoners were buried here, many of them political prisoners.

And in a matter also associated with this time of year , the Polish Central Statistical Office has reported on Twitter that the heaviest pumpkin grown in Poland in 2019 is 870 kg., and that this year’s pumpkin harvest was coming to an end.

The Office went on to report that last year around 71,000 tonnes of pumpkins were harvested, up from 45,000 tonnes in 2017.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s heaviest ever pumpkin was grown in Belgium and weighed 1190.5 kg.

A new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, ordered by Poland’s national carrier LOT Polish Airlines, landed in Warsaw at the weekend after a nine-hour-and-50-minute direct flight from the factory of the US producer Boeing in Charleston, North Carolina and is the fifteenth Boeing 787 Dreamliner in the LOT’s fleet. Last year the Polish national carrier LOT hosted over 8.9 million passengers, 2 million more than in the previous year and currently operates 80 aircraft serving over 100 routes.

The weather

Today is expected to be warmer and drier than yesterday with temperatures reaching 10 deg Celsius, 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
 

RGEN