br23 blog - minsk, belarus

The effects of the internal struggle inside the “grand coalition” in Germany can be felt even in Belarus.
A Chrisitan democrat Georg Schirmbeck after visiting Minsk last week sharply critisized Belarusan regime in his interviews to German media, calling it “last dictatorship of Europe”, saying that Belarus is showing “revival of Stalin’s traditions”, and calling for […]

My wife seems to have a lots of fun lately. Last week, she had a Thanksgiving dinner at a high-tech million-dollar house of a former vice-president of Microsoft (who has been a Microsoft’s VP for 10 years, now retired and moved to Czech Republic). He seemed to like her and even served her coffee personally. […]

Telegraph: “The nightmare of nuclear war in Europe - a spectre that haunted the world for half a century - stood revealed yesterday in terrible detail.
In a historic break with the past, Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives - including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision […]

“Do business in Albania,” ran a joke popular among German businessmen, “your car’s already there.”
Albanians are so sick of police doing nothing about the theft and hijacking of luxury cars that they’ve taken to setting up their own informal networks of hot-lines and roadblocks.
When a big new Mercedes was stolen at gunpoint earlier this […]

The hottest issue (pun intended) on Belarusian blogs today is the expulsion of Tatsiana Khoma from the university. She is the first Belarusian (in fact, the first Eastern European) to have been elected to the Council of the biggest European students’ organization ESIB. Today she was informed that she was expelled from the Belarus […]

The biggest Polish newspapers shocked their readership today with their massive support action for the freedom of press in Belarus by blacking out the stories and photos on the front page with a “censor’s” marker.
Here’s the BBC story and the photos:
• BBC: Polish press in Belarus protest

So they really sacrificed the whole front […]

An influential Polish newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza” reported on Friday that Belarus is planning to buy special hardware and software from China for filtering internet traffic. There’s no doubt, the system will be used for internet censorship prior to the presidential elections in 2006. China already has a lot of experience in blocking internet sites, so […]

• pig_slaughter3.mov (11Mb, QuickTime MOVie)
This weekend we had a great time in a village in Silezia. This is one of the short videos from the pig slaughtering on Saturday morning. The pig was shot about two minutes before, and still had convulsions, and the old guy Honza just slit her throat. The most funny thing, […]

I’ve finally bought a new camera, a smooth black 6-megapixel Olympus with impressive lenses (see it on Amazon). What I need now is to read a good introductory book about the art of photography. And I suppose I need an account on Flickr, or are there other cool places to host a photo blog? Any […]

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way people use English language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. WordCount data comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent […]