These are #european bison rather than imports from the #us . Thirty years ago they were almost extinct - small populations in north east #romania and north east #poland They have since been introduced elsewhere - including the #netherlands and even the #english county of #kent - somewhere normally not at all keen on anything #european !
Losses caused by the Polish blockade of the Ukrainian border amounted to $500 million in lost imports and $160 million in exports in its first month, the National Bank of Ukraine said on May 14.
Built from the ground-up as a separate city to settle workers employed in the newly built steelworks (it's even in the name, which literally means 'the new steelworks'). Designed as a poster city for Soviet propagandists. Huge, industrial, pompous. These days it's one of the most populous parts of Kraków, even though it completely didn't feel that way during my long weekend visit.
I barely scratched the surface, as severe planning mistakes were made on my end. Plus I don't like taking cliche postcard photos in harsh light. But I managed to see three different faces of this place and that counts I guess.
We start with the socrealistic face. The one that dates back to 1950s and truly feels different than whatever my peanut Warsaw brain assumed Kraków to be.
10 May 2024 around 20:00 in the evening around 140 men stormed the #Poland border from #Belarus and were pushed back by Polish border force and army.
The times when small groups of actual migrants, including families with women and children, sneaked through the forest are long gone. Since around 2022 it’s exclusively young, masked men, often equipped with strobe lights and lasers and guided by uniformed Belarussian border guards. Granted that in 2022 Belarus welcomed a large group of “Wagner Group” mercenaries and employed them as instructors, speaking of “migrants” is no longer sustainable - these are coordinated attempts of storming EU border by men who can be Russian/Belarussian saboteurs or “Wagner” mercenaries, or any combination of these.
Since reportage and documentary are among my strongest interests in photography, this deserves some of my attention as well.
So, for various reasons I happened to be awake as early as 4am on Sunday and I saw this huge smoke above the block of flats in my area. At first I thought it was a rain cloud, but I looked deeper and something was clearly off.
I decided to take an early morning stroll to see what was going on and saw this.
I thought it was something close to my area, but my senses couldn't stop second-guessing me. I hadn't heard any explosion. I couldn't smell anything or feel the heat. It was still damn cold minutes before sunrise.
Funny enough, a day earlier I installed Fallout Shelter on my tablet and I had a lot of apocalyptic thoughts looking at that.
What happened is that a huge shopping center in Warsaw caught massive fire. So massive it could be seen from literally anywhere in the city. No reports on injuries, but thousands of people lost their businesses, many of them family-run.
There's also a lot of political background as well as quite a sizable room for conspiracy theories, but that's for another time maybe.
#writing mastodon, could you recommend any good resources on organizing a #shortStory#contest, especially in context of optimal text length / jury size / time?
National Bank: Ukraine's losses from Polish blockade partially offset by maritime trade (kyivindependent.com)
Losses caused by the Polish blockade of the Ukrainian border amounted to $500 million in lost imports and $160 million in exports in its first month, the National Bank of Ukraine said on May 14.