Oh, that lovely breath of the warm Black Sea. Unmatched nightlife. Crazy prices for the housing, quality of which would give a birth to an inexpressible confusion to anybody who ever cared about the difference between one-, two- and minus 5 star hotels. (By the way, there, in the place we are talking about, small […]

PRAGUE, August 18, 2006 (RFE/RL) –Fifteen years after the failed coup that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union and transformed his own life, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev talks to RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service about the events of August 1991 and their legacy.
RFE/RL: In his annual address to the Federal Assembly in 2005, Russian […]

New wave of arrests came down on Belarusian opposition in the past few days. And by saying a “wave” I really mean it because literally all opposition leaders found themselves behind the bars under similar circumstances. It seems that Lukashenka’s regime decided not to waste any time and get down to their dirty business of […]

Belarus has marked the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl catastrophe. 10,000 thousands of Belarusians took to the streets of Minsk for a traditional Charnobylski Shlyakh (The Path of Chernobyl). This year the rally was held under the motto “Freedom. Truth. Justice”. The Belarusians protested not only against the official policy of hushing up the aftermaths of […]

16:30, 11/03/2006
Today in Belarus opponents of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime abduct people. Unknown representatives of law-enforcing agencies in mufti seize people in the streets, without producing any documents, and take them to police departments, and then in courts, where obedient judges pass sentences on wrongful charges. For instance, yesterday in Minsk Zubr activists Alyaksei Lyaukovich, Paval […]

When was the last time you read a complete non-sense statement from authorities? And not just complete but out of this world? The one that crosses all possible logic lines? Here is the one and it should drive sane people nuts. I do not know what kind of pot someone should smoke to come up […]

I think that it will be fair to say that most of us know about cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper. For those who don’t, if there are such people, those cartoons depicted Prophet Mohhamad, the huge no-no in Islam, and immediatly set many places around the world on fire, literally. I don’t want […]

Not long ago I had a conversation with a friend who happened to be from Turkey. Somewhere in the middle of our discussion of legacy of Ataturk, the founder and first President of the republic of Turkey, my friend snapped: “…sorry, but you will not understand Us anyway.”
“Why not? I spent five years closely interacting […]

Did you read “1984″ by G.Orwell? If an answer is “Yes” than you should also know that Orwell’s world is closer than you might think. According to The New York Times, the National Security Agency has eavesdropped, without warrants, on as many 500 people inside the United States at any given time since 2002. Without […]

The Deir Yassin massacre (Deir Yassin is also transliterated from Arabic as Dayr Yasin and frequently (mis)transliterated from Hebrew writings as Dir Yassin) refers to the killing of scores of Arab civilians at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine by Jewish irregular forces between April 9 and 11, […]