Warsaw  - Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will meet with US, German and Ukrainian leaders in Munich for talks on improving relations with Russia and a proposed US anti-missile shield on Polish soil, the Polish Press Agency PAP reported on Friday.

Tusk will meet privately on Saturday with Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko, US vice-president Joe Biden and German chancellor Angela Merkel during an annual security conference. The talks will cover the missile shield, and boosting NATO and European Union relations with Russia, PAP reported.

Warsaw - Polish President Lech Kaczynski has signed an act that cuts pensions to former communist security services and military council members, according to an announcement on his website Friday.

The law, passed by parliament last month, will take effect in 2010. It will strip former security service members and members of the Military Council of National Salvation
(WRON) who imposed martial law in 1981 of their pensions.

Warsaw- Polish President Lech Kaczynski signed an act cutting pensions to former communist security services and military council members, his website announced on Friday.

The law, passed by parliament last month, will take effect in 2010. It will strip pensions to former security service members and those of the Military Council of National Salvation (WRON) who imposed martial law in 1981.

The announcement comes on the anniversary of Poland's Round Table talks, when communist officials in 1989 first sat down with Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement to negotiate on power-sharing.

Warsaw - Poland will end its missions in Chad, Lebanon and the Golan Heights, Defence Minister Bogdan Klich announced on Wednesday, as part of government budget cuts prompted by the economic downturn.

Klich told Radio ZET that Wednesday he will inform President Lech Kaczynski of the plans to axe those three peace-keeping missions, but that Polish troops will remain in Afghanistan and Kosovo.

"In accordance with the strategy accepted by the government in early January, the NATO missions are an absolute priority," he told Radio ZET.

Warsaw - Although Poles now feel richer, more free and better dressed, they also feel more stress than under communism, said a poll Tuesday in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

Some 91 per cent said they feel more stress now than they did during Poland's communist regime from 1945 to 1989, said the survey of 500 people. Nearly 70 per cent said they are now working harder and have less time for friends and family.

Warsaw - Seven Polish soldiers accused of killing Afghan civilians took the stand on Tuesday in what was the first trial in Polish history on violating the Hague and Geneva conventions.

The court ruled to close the proceedings off to the media, saying it could lead to "dramatization" of the case and that the hall was too small to hold journalists.

Prosecutors claim to have strong evidence that the soldiers unlawfully killed civilians in the Afghan village of Nangar Khel in August 2007. They say the villagers posed no threat and the soldiers knowingly fired into building that contained civilians.