Poland:The Polish government has blocked a €15.3 million application for EU funding by fundamentalist broadcaster Radio Maryja.
It had been added to a list of organisations approved for funding by the previous administration of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The station broadcasts a mixture of prayer, discussion and polemic to an audience of about one million in rural Poland. Together with sister television station TV Trwam, Radio Maryja helped twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski secure their presidential and parliamentary election victories in 2005.
The Kaczynski government returned the favour by making the stations their in-house information service, ignoring international complaints that they broadcast anti-Semitic views, Holocaust denial and hate speech.
The station's firebrand founder, Redemptorist priest Fr Tadeusz Rydzyk, had planned to use the EU funds to expand his national conservative College of Social and Media Culture in the town of Torun, north of Warsaw.
Fr Rydzyk launched Radio Maryja in Torun in 1991 as "the Catholic voice in your home". His postgraduate college has so far turned out about 150 graduates in journalism, political science and computer science.
Elzbieta Bienkowska, Poland's minister for regional development, rejected his funding application, saying: "Fr Rydzyk's school does not fulfil the required criteria."
The priest's application for EU funding raised eyebrows last year: he was one of Poland's most vehement critics of the EU ahead of the country's accession in 2004. Since last autumn's change of government the station has lost its influence.