br23 blog - minsk, belarus

U.S. Department of State actually became interactive in 2006. You can ask them all kinds of questions online. On Monday, April 3, Daniel Fried, Assistant Secretary, chief of European and Eurasian Affairs, will discuss the recent elections in Belarus and Ukraine. You can send your questions now.
I’ve sent this:
Dear Ambassador Fried:
The main reveleation, the main […]

I’m shocked. My dad just called from Minsk an told me that I won the main award at the 4th National Web Content Contest, organized by TUT.BY. This is the most popular Web award in Belarus, excluding the professional contests among graphic Web designers.
Br23 blog won the first place in blogs category, and the grand […]

“Muslims in Albania’s northern city of Shkoder are opposing plans to erect a statue to Mother Teresa, the ethnic Albanian Catholic nun in line for elevation to sainthood by the Vatican.
The dispute is unusual for Albania, where religion was banned for 27 years under the regime of dictator Enver Hoxha and where religious harmony […]

Today, Alexander Milinkevich met with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz in Warsaw. And this is already second such meeting in the last several months. Together with the Polish prime minister Milinkevich signed an agreement that Polish government will provide scholarships in Poland to Belarusian students who were (or will […]

A Czech reporter from the popular newspaper “Mlada Fronta Dnes” Jan Rybar that was beaten up in Minsk, 200 meters from October square, told his story to RFE/RL Belarus service today. He thinks he “underestimated the dangers” of covering the protests on October square: he was attacked several hundred meters away from the square, in […]

A former president of Czech Republic Vaclav Havel (who gets invited to the most exclusive political and social events all over the planet, by top politicians and royalty alike) was denied entry by the Belarusan embassy in Prague today when he attempted to personally hand over a petition condemning undemocratic and non-free elections in Belarus. […]

• A Canadian journalist [1]
• A former Polish ambassador (!) to Belarus; [2]
• Two Georgian TV reporters;
• Two Ukrainian activists;
• Three Russian human rights activists.
Probably there are more. Courts and police refuse to provide information. These are only the ones that already got “processed” by courts and sentenced to 15-day administrative arrests.

On March 23 Viachaslau Siuchyk (a prominent opposition activist) received a phone call on his mobile. A girl said she’s a representative of the U.S.Embassy in Belarus, and she told him that Ambassador George Krol wants to meet him. Siuchyk was a bit surprised that he couldn’t see the number on his mobile phone (it […]

My most favorite sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, died today in Kraków, Poland, at the age of 84. His books have been translated into 41 languages and sold over 27 million copies. At one point he was the most widely read science fiction author in the world.
I wrote about his books in this blog several months […]

Just after that peaceful protest was brutally broken up by the police, my web server suddenly went down. I’m investigating with the hoster whether it was a DDOS attack or just a regular malfunction (my California-based hoster had several days of downtime in the last several months due to technical problems). Usually though, downtime is […]