In the second half of 2011 Poland holds the EU Presidency for the first time.

To get you in the swing of Poland and the EU, here is a new blog by my friend the excellent Polish Gazeta journalist Dominika Pszczólkowska: Poland in the EU.

The point about reading Blogs from other parts of the world is that they see events from quite different angles. See Dominika deftly picking up Ukraine making a fool of itself at the recent NATO/Ukraine Council.

In case your false or even real teeth shoot out trying to pronounce her surname, it goes something like this: P-sh-ch-oow-kov-ska. It comes (I think) from the root of the Polish word for a bee: pszczo