US ambassador’s Passover

wishes in Polish met with anger

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The U.S. ambassador to Poland wished Jews a happy Passover in Polish, and the reaction was a wave of angry comments on Twitter.

Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher also wished Poles a happy Easter on Sunday. By then, Mosbacher had been accused of offending Poland with her Passover tweet and reminded she is serving in a predominantly Roman Catholic country.

Krystyna Pawlowicz, a lawmaker with Poland’s right-wing ruling party, called the ambassador’s tweet, which was posted Friday along with a colorful illustration of items for a Passover Seder, a “provocation.”

Some came to Mosbacher’s defense, recalling that Poland also has a small Jewish population. Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population before the Holocaust.

Michal Szczerba, an opposition lawmaker, put some blame on the ruling Law and Justice party, accusing it of encouraging Polish nationalists by failing to react to past cases of racism and anti-Semitism.

Mosbacher’s critics included far-right activist Robert Bakiewicz, who organizes a yearly Independence Day march that Polish government officials joined last year.

North Macedonia police say

58 migrants found in stopped van

SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — Police say officers patrolling a main highway in North Macedonia found 58 migrants packed into a van and detained three men on suspicion of smuggling migrants.

Police said in a statement issued Sunday that the officers stopped the van on Saturday afternoon and arrested two Macedonian citizens and a third man from Kosovo.

The statement says 56 of the people packed inside the van were from Pakistan and two were from Syria.

Police say they were taken to a shelter in the southern town of Gevgelija, near the border with Greece and will be deported.

They allege the migrants entered North Macedonia illegally from Greece and were to be transported north to Serbia’s border and then on to other European countries.