The language of media is a bit different, both in vocabulary and grammar, than the normal writing. One of the differences is the tense, as you've mentioned. If the time of the event, state,... is past, the tense of the sentence is present; if it is past perfect, then the sentence is past; and you can figure out the rest. For example, the verbs in the first paragraph would be in the past tense if it wasn't a part of newspaper article (this also can happen in narrations in a book or story, ...as well), so we would have:
Many of today's headlines focused on the new alliance with France. The Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper wrote "Poland teamed up with France against stingy Great Britain". Just two weeks ago, it added, the Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, had told his British counterpart Tony Blair in London, that Poland considered the UK its closest European ally.
And about "is offered", the sententence is passive, and it was actually "was offered". Hope that it helps.