Give the control panel method a try -- you can always back it out if it doesn't work right.

Personally, I would do it manually in .htaccess. I'm not sure the control panel redirect tool is flexible enough (it might be). If what you want is any http://domain.com/directory/* to go to http://domain.com/newdirectory/index.html:
This would be a silent URL rewrite. If you want search engines and so on to update themselves, add R=301, before the L flag. Either way, any URL Query String content should come over automatically.

Is that a } or ] you have after REQUEST_URI? It should be a }. I would have expected you to get a 500 error if you had a ], so on the assumption it's }...

You are on an Apache server (not Windows IIS), right? This won't work on Windows. The source directory is http://domain.com/outlook/ and you're redirecting it to http://domain.com/poland-news/index.html? If you remove the R=301, does it work then? If that's the case, change the rewrite to http://domain.com/poland-news/index.html.

Also, I assume it's index.html in your target directory -- you could probably leave that off the rewrite if you wanted.

Is it still not working? I'm not quite clear from your post.

Let me rephrase my question. Are you on a "Linux" server? That would use Apache web services. If you're on a Windows server (IIS web services), it will ignore your .htaccess file. If you already had an .htaccess file, that the control panel had put commands into, then yes, you can assume you're on Linux.

You might try commenting out (with #) or removing (via control panel) any redirections placed by the control panel, in case they're interfering with the code you just added. Or, you might move the new code up to the top, in case the control panel redirections are doing it wrong.

Since moving the new code to the top helped, have you tried the other two things again:
1. change [R=301,L] to [L]
2. change /poland-news/index.html to http://www.masterpage.com.pl/poland-news/index.html

Did either one have any effect? If you use the http: form, put the R=301 back in. This is kind of grasping at straws, because if /outlook redirects, so should /outlook/birdflu.html. Are you sure you're using exactly what is shown here? I see when I type in /outlook, that it's /poland-news/ that comes up, not /poland-news/index.html. Do you have other code in your .htaccess that is concealing the index.html? Is there anything before the 3 lines you added for me? What other statements do you have in your .htaccess?