Sales of condoms and birth control in Poland shrank by 10 percent and 3.2 percent respectively over a year as of October 2011, the first such drop on record, fresh market surveys showed Tuesday.

Further studies of the data compiled by the Nielsen and IMS Health pharmaceutical market analysts due out in February are expected to pinpoint the causes behind this unprecedented contraction in the contraceptives sector.

Dressed in white tutus, seven pensioners from a village in southern Poland love to get on their tiptoes to dance ballet classics like Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".

All these new-found ballerinas are grandmothers -- one is even a great-grandmother -- and the oldest member of the troupe is 73.

Poland's first nuclear power plant, due to come on line by 2020, is set to be located near the Baltic Sea, Polish energy group PGE said on Friday.

Three potential sites near the coast, at Zarnowiec, Choczewo and Gaski, were picked from around a hundred proposed locations, PGE chief Tomasz Zadroga told reporters.

A Russian consul stopped for driving bizarrely on a Polish road was found to be 15 times over the drink-driving limit, but could not be busted due to diplomatic immunity, police said Monday.

The consul's BMW was spotted on Sunday driving on a road near the Baltic port city of Gdansk, police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.

Poles went to the polls Sunday in a general election, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk aiming for a landmark second term and pushing a message of prudent economic stewardship which kept the nation out of recession.

Pro-European centrist Tusk, whose Civic Platform (PO) won a snap vote in 2007, has warned against a return of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party which clashed regularly with EU allies when it was in power.

A controversial European Union bid to impose a tax on financial transactions is intended to make the finance sector pay something back after massive public sector bailouts in recent years.

Draft European Commission legislation endeavors to prevent companies from relocating outside the single market, as critics claim, or consumers from picking up the tab further down the line, as campaigners fear.

Flouting the age-old parental refrain, "Don't play with your food!" comes a zany Irish production called "Cirque de Legume" which is all about playing with food. Specifically, with root vegetables.

The chewing, spewing and other abuse of leafy produce has been raised to an art form by the hilarious, deliberately awkward duo performing "Cirque de Legume," which opened Sunday night off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters as part of the yearlong 2011 Imagine Ireland festival. It's an animal-vegetable-maniac circus, laden with slapstick and humor at the expense of a basket of vegetables.

With just nine months left until Euro 2012, organizers and experts say host country Poland will reap long-term economic benefits from Europe's top international football showcase.

"Euro 2012 is a catalyst of positive change. It's a catalyst, and not just a goal in itself," said Marcin Herra, who heads PL.2012, the body overseeing a bewildering array of projects from stadiums to airports and hotels to highways.

The red brick walls of the synagogue in Gora Kalwaria, once a center of Jewish culture in Poland, reverberate anew with music lost in the Holocaust, thanks to one man's search for his Polish roots.

In the 1930s, a group of Jewish mandolin players from this small town just south of the capital Warsaw gained popularity across the country before many of them perished at the hands of Poland's Nazi German occupiers.

European champions Barcelona will open a football school to polish young talent in Warsaw this week as Poland gears up to co-host Euro 2012 with Ukraine, a city official said on Monday.

"We've been working on the project for a year now. Barca feel that Poland is a good place to open this kind of school because of its infrastructure and the upcoming Euro 2012," Warsaw city sports advisor Wieslaw Wilczynski told Agence France Presse.