br23 blog - minsk, belarus

As many of you probably know, the dominating language in the capital, Minsk, is Russian. You can hear it on the streets all the time, and Belarusian is nowhere to be heard (although you can see it on billboards and street signs). Here’s a recent web survey which I think should be, if not scientifically […]

Today I got an email from Jan Malicki, a chairman of Eastern European studies program in Warsaw University. He writes that Warsaw University is going to grant 20 scholarships to graduate students from Belarus and Ukraine, to study politology for one year (from March till December, 2006). The deadline for applications is January 20, […]

IMHO, Ukrainian-Russian “gas war” is one of the most important and crucial battles in the region, ever since USSR broke up. It also shows what kind of treatment Belarus might face, if Kremlin gets upset with our political line. The problem is that now Belarus is very dependent on cheap Russian gas, and by the […]

Toronto Star published a brilliant commentary about Vladimir Putin’s best friend Gerhard Schroeder:
It’s one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It’s quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany leaves his job and goes to […]

A mysterious panegyric verse on the arms of the famous [BLANK] family from the little-known New Testament published in the Holy Ghost Monastery in Vilnia (Vilnius) in 1623:

Клейнотъ гербовъ совытый, з двоякой цноты
Домом зацным неданы есть: пре дѣльность, труд, поты
Двема кресты з стрѣлою дом […] славных:
Бог, Свѣтъ, Моужство, Очизна, з вѣков стародавных
Вы выешыли: крестами врага […]

I haven’t commented about the #1 news item from the last week, which was the announcement about the presidential elections date. Belarus’s lower house of parliament set 19 March 2006 as the date for next year’s presidential election, voting unanimously 104 - for, zero - against.
The date was set much earlier that it was […]

Today’s issue of New York Times has an article about Belarus:
NYT. French Faces, Farewell: Belarus Has Beauties of Its Own (you might need to login to read it, but you can use a password from bugmenot.com for example)
NYT is reporting the news that are one year old, that’s something! Nothing new or interesting there anyway, […]

Almost by accident I’ve received six back issues of “New Scientist” from 2002 which I read yesterday and today with great interest. I was quite surpised to see that even short-term forecasts in science don’t seem to hold up. Here are just a few funny ones that I’ve spotted:
• Cloning. The January issue predicts […]

After running out of free space on my 60 GB drive, I bought a new 200 GB Maxtor a couple days ago. Installing it on my PC was quite an adventure (a bit embarrassing too), but at the end we figured it out.

Some websites and main-stream media have reprinted the news that our government wants to design its own Belarusian operating system which is supposed to be a big rival to Microsoft Windows, without really knowing what they are reporting about. The original source of the news was a press conference organized by the Ministry of Information. […]