Warsaw - The head of security for Polish President Lech Kaczynski was fired after shooting rang out on Sunday near the Polish and Georgian presidential motorcade near the South Ossetian border, local media reported on Thursday.

Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec was fired amid allegations he had failed to provide adequate security during the incident, Polish media reported.

The government issued a report on Thursday saying the incident was not an attack on the Georgian and Polish presidents, and Poland's Government Protection Bureau (BOR) was not given adequate time to arrange security for the visit, reported the Polish Press Agency.

Warsaw  - As the European Union seeks to slash greenhouse gas emissions, Polish coal miners are worried - and defiant.

Coal provides 94 per cent of Poland's energy and some 117,000 jobs, a fact that's come into focus as the country prepares to host global talks on a new climate-saving pact.

"Everyone wants to live in healthy air. But you have to find some kind of balance, and you can't do that at the expense of the economy, industry and jobs," said Waclaw Czerkawski, deputy head of Poland's Trade Union of Miners.

Poland's government agrees. Together with other ex-communist EU nations and Italy, it has threatened to block plans to cut the bloc's carbon dioxide pollution to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Warsaw - Polish researchers launched a probe on Tuesday into the 1943 death of World War II General Wladyslaw Sikorski, hoping to determine if it was an accident or possible Soviet-planned assassination.

Sikorski's coffin was taken out of its sarcophagus from a crypt in a Krakow cathedral, and was later to be transported for DNA and medical tests. Results are expected in about a month.

Sikorski died on July 1943 while returning from a troop inspection in the Middle East. The Royal Air Force plane crashed into the sea minutes after take-off from Gibraltar.

Moscow - Shots fired at the Polish and Georgian presidential motorcade near the South Ossetian border were staged and "yet another provocation" by Georgia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.

Georgia said Russian forces had opened fire on the motorcade carrying Polish and Georgian Presidents Lech Kaczynski and Mikheil Saakashvili on Sunday from the airport in Tbilisi to a settlement near the Ossetian border.

Prague  - Two Polish miners died and three were slightly injured when a coal mine in north-eastern Czech Republic in which they were working suffered a seismic movement, the mining company's owner said Sunday.

The movement occurred before midnight Saturday as 21 Polish miners were extracting coal in the underground mine, which belongs to the country's largest mining company OKD, said Vladimir Bystrov, a spokesman for OKD's parent company New World Resources.

The causes of the jolt were not immediately known and an investigation was under way, Bystrov said.

The dead miners, aged 39 and 46, were the first earth-tremor victims in OKD's mines this year, he said. Five other people had so far died in the firm's mines in 2008.

Warsaw  - Poland's capital on Wednesday marked the completion of a massive restoration project that marks the borders of the former Jewish Ghetto that was walled in by Nazis occupiers during World War II.

The mayor of Warsaw, along with the minister of culture, inaugurated the project that included 21 new information points along the boundaries of the former Jewish Ghetto. The project also placed a beige line, labeled "Ghetto Wall," along the city streets that outlined the furthest reaches of the Ghetto's borders.

The line snakes along sidewalks and around apartments and offices, broken only when it reaches roads or tram lines.