This is the exact reason the President and Vice-President travel separately in the States; so the line of succession is preserved. It is a shame, no matter how corrupt or evil someone is, I always mourn the loss of human life. Thanks for keeping us updated Piz, it's sometimes easier to hear from someone listening to local media than it is to wait and try to decipher the news from the international media (they dilute and spin everything).

Succession is preserved here too. But according to our Constitution the real President has to be chosen very soon.
Our Prime Minister always flies separted too, but we only have one gov. plane ;/ so, luckily, he stayed in country.

We had news every few minutes, now it's fairly stabilized. The list of people who died is terribly long.
The wiki entry is already surprisingly long as well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Po...e_Tu-154_crash

It was fog. The pilot had tried to land three or four times before the final, fatal attempt. It was said that it was possible the president making the pilot land. There had been a previous case when he went to Georgia (not the US state) and he insisted on landing there, even though it was dangerous. That time the pilot resisted him, but maybe this pilot couldn't.

Atm the truth is different. There was no fog and the plane started to tear down to pieces 1km before the crash. The pieces were found far before the crash site. I am not sure if Russia will show us the real recordings of black boxes, since they refused polish experts to participate in processing the recordings.

We actually CAN understand what witnesses say, polish and russian. Some of the media deleted their speeches. The fog was an hour before the crash, but there was none when it happened.

But true. It happened in Georgia before, the pilot refused to land in dangerous terrain, he was fired later. This one had to obey.

Very suspiciuos... and sad.
I'm not very keen on politicians (specially the ones in my country), but it seems as if this is a real tragedy. I guess they were really important.
It's a really cruel irony. Sorry for you, Piz...

This is a sad time for all polish people my prayers and thoughts are with you all.

Thats a bad day especially for the polish but also for the rest of the European people. The Polish president was against totalitarianism and for the sovereignty of Poland.

Hopefully this was only a usual accident without the influence of any other state or secret agency etc..

The polish president was besides the czech president the only political leader who was against the "Treaty of Lisbon" (the European Constitution). This Treaty could lead to a totalitarian confederation. Especially if the current crisis is becoming much worse (and it will probably), there is a way to expand the power of the EU in a undemocratic way.

Even a English politican (Nigel Farage) who is member of the European Parliament claims that the EU is developing to be undemocratic and bad for the people.

We knew that :/ but the president signed the Treaty, cause of restriction threats from EU. We were really glad that Vaclav Klaus thinks like most of us. Unfortunately our pro-EU side of government is now in bigger numbers..

I never liked our president. But I never hated him either. Now I'm just sad and it's all like a dream. I can barely believe this.

We saw a report from crash site, where his twin brother put some flowers and prayed. God I saw fear in his eyes, I don't know if it's just.. you know. Lost of his most important person in life or the fact he just got back from recognizing the bodies of his twin brother and his wife.

I would not go as far to call the advance of the European Union totalitarianism. What we've seen in the past few years is that all governments only pursue their own interests, weakening Europe.
We cannot keep pretending that all countries will do just fine without the EU. Imagine what would have happened to Europe if we wouldn't have had the Euro! But in order to control this we need a proper organisation, an organisation that is more open and democratic and less centred around the governments and their own, petty interests. The Treaty of Lisbon was good for this because it gave the European Parliament more power and installed a EU-president, someone who is above the parties and therefore can decide better what's best for the continent, instead of what's best for one single country.

We've seen in the past few months how good it is to have a more powerful parliament. Not only did they recognise the Goldstone report and prevented the Swift treaty to be accepted -- a treaty that would give the United States unlimited access to the European bank transactions -- and they called for more openness on ACTA and said they would otherwise sue the European Commission. All thanks to the Lisbon Treaty.

I just looked for ""Treaty of lisbon" and totalitarianism" on ixquick.com and found this really interesting video on YouTube, which shows some points of the contra Lisbon Treaty politicians.

Creeping EU Totalitarianism


You mention the Euro as success for the EU, but in the current crisis its not a safe currency. A lot of people who have Euro savings on the banks buy gold, silver or take up shares or exchange their Euros with a safer currency (USD, Pound, Yen is probably not considerable safer), because they fear a huge inflation or a worse bank crisis. The next months and next few years might be pretty interesting I think.

The secret Bilderberger conferences of the politician and economic elite exists really, that is not a conspiracy theory. And people can have doubts about their good interests...