WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish prosecutors filed charges Friday against a former defense minister, accusing him of exceeding his powers when he declassified parts of a plan for national defense that had been prepared years before under an earlier government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Tusk's government has accused the former defense minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, of betraying national interests by revealing military secrets for political gain ahead of a national election.
“If we were to imagine the basic task of a spy in Poland, the theft of defense plans would be his priority, but no one predicted that such a role could be played by the minister of national defense,” the current deputy defense minister, Cezary Tomczyk, said last month in parliament.
Błaszczak served as defense minister in a national conservative government that held power from 2015-2023. In 2023 he made public parts of a military defense plan that had been drawn up in 2011. The document laid out plans for the Polish army to retreat westward to the Vistula River, which runs through the center of Poland, in case of an invasion from the east by Russia.
Błaszczak was read the charges at the District Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw on Friday, he told reporters afterward, according to the state news agency PAP.
He said he believed the allegations were unfounded.
He wrote on X that he was being charged for"declassifying the plan of the first Tusk government to give up half of Poland without a fight.”
“I would do it again without hesitation. I had not only the right, but also the duty" he said.
“Thanks to this, Poles know the truth about the fate you prepared for the inhabitants of Eastern Poland,” he said, addressing Tusk. "Thanks to this, no one will ever return to such plans.”
FILE - Polish Defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak arrives at the European Air Defense Conference at Les Invalides monument in Paris, Monday, June 19, 2023. (Geoffroy Van der Hasselt/Pool via AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of New York City nurses returned to the picket lines Tuesday as their strike targeting some of the city’s leading hospital systems entered its second day.
Union officials say roughly 15,000 nurses walked off the job Monday morning at multiple campuses of three hospital systems: NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai.
The affected hospitals have hired droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap. Both nurses and hospital administrators have urged patients not to avoid getting care during the strike.
New York City, like the U.S. as a whole, has had an active flu season. The city logged over 32,000 cases during the week ending Dec. 20 — the highest one-week tally in at least 20 years — though numbers have since declined, the Health Department said last Thursday.
Roy Permaul, an intensive care unit nurse who was among those picketing in front of Mount Sinai's flagship campus in Manhattan, said he and his colleagues are prepared to walk off the job as long as needed to secure a better contract.
But Dania Munoz, a nurse practitioner at Mount Sinai, stressed that the union’s fight wasn’t just about better wages.
“We deserve fair pay, but this is about safety for our patients, for ourselves and for our profession,” the 31-year-old Bronx resident said. “The things that we’re fighting for, we need. We need health care. We need safety. We need more staffing.”
The New York State Nurses Association said Tuesday that none of the hospitals have agreed to additional bargaining sessions with the union since their last meetings on Sunday.
It also complained that Mount Sinai, which operates seven hospitals, unlawfully fired three nurses hours after the strike started and improperly disciplined 14 others who had spoken out about workplace violence or discussed the union and contract negotiations with their colleagues.
Mount Sinai spokespersons said Tuesday the claims were “not accurate” and that they would provide more information later. Mt. Sinai has said approximately 20% of its nurses reported for work on the first day of the strike rather than picketing.
Meanwhile, Montefiore Medical Center said it has “not canceled even one patient’s access to care” during the work stoppage. The city Emergency Management Department said it hasn’t seen major impacts to patient care so far.
The hospital system also criticized unionized nurses for seeking “troubling proposals” such as demanding that nurses not be terminated, even if found to be compromised by drugs or alcohol while on the job.
The union said Montefiore was “blatantly mischaracterizing” one of its basic workplace proposals, which would have added protections for nurses dealing with substance use disorders and which has already been adopted in other hospitals around the state.
The labor action comes three years after a similar strike forced medical facilities to transfer some patients and divert ambulances.
As with the 2023 labor action, nurses have pointed to staffing issues as a major flashpoint, accusing the big-budget medical centers of refusing to commit to provisions for safe, manageable workloads.
The private, nonprofit hospitals involved in the current negotiations say they’ve made strides in staffing in recent years and have cast the union’s demands as prohibitively expensive.
On Monday, the city's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, stood beside nurses on a picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian, praising the union’s members for seeking “dignity, respect and the fair pay and treatment that they deserve.”
Nurses strike in front of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Nurses strike in front of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Nurses strike outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
