br23 blog - minsk, belarus

It seems no one cares about that guy, so I feel obliged to write about his case again, to give him just a little bit more exposure, though I don’t have such a big audience (probably, about 100-200 readers). The latest news is that Zmicier Pimenau is still in jail and he began another hunger […]

• www.rferl.org/specials/roundtable — a bunch of short videos from the round table “Strengthening The Transition To Democracy in Belarus and Ukraine.” You need to have Real Player installed on your machine in order to be able watch the video.

Alaksandr Lukashenka will probably sign the amendments to the Criminal code today, on December 12, or tomorrow. Then on December 20 (wihch is still marked as the Day of KGB in the Belarusan calendars) the law will be enacted, and it looks like KGB will start prosecuting people immediately starting on that date. That’s what […]

Robert Sheckley, a brilliant sci-fi master with comic and satiric mood, has died at the age of 77. I loved his short stories. He was pretty popular in Minsk (and former USSR in general, I think). I just wrote a short entry about him in the Belarusian Wikipedia.
A Russian media specialist who has a […]

Our man in Belgium, Zmicier Pimenau, the one that was arrested during a recent Belarusian protest in Brussels, has already spent one month behind bars in a Belgian jail, and police still refuses to inform the public about why they arrested him, why they are keeping him in custody, and what are the charges. This […]

Just out of curiousity, do you listen to internet radios or podcasts? Which stations do you listen to? Do you prefer live streaming or MP3’s via podcasting? Do you use Windows Media Player or Real Player or some other software? (I temporarily open comments to everyone. You don’t have to register in order to leave […]

It looks like we’ve got the first serious reaction from European structures regarding that student which was expelled from BSEU:
EUA suspends Belarus State Economic University membership:
Following the decision by the Belarus State Economic University to expel a fourth year student, Ms Tatsiana Khoma, for participating in a meeting of the National Unions of Students in […]

A German linguist Sonja Heyl from Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität Institut für Slawistik has written a Belarusian language study guide, which will be published in 2006. It’s already listed on amazon.de:
• Lehrbuch der weißruthenischen Sprache (250 pages, 29 euro)
• Audio-CD, weißruthenische Sprache (19 euro)
That’s nice to know someone is doing this. So far, the only Belarusian-language book […]

BBC: Belarus tightens up protest laws
The law will make it a criminal offence to “discredit” the Belarusian state both within Belarus and abroad - with a three year jail term for offenders.
So it happened today. The puppet parliament had no problem at all voting for Lukashenka’s amendments, which are almost exact replica’s of […]